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Amanda Sopkin
Amanda Sopkin

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New Developer Year Resolutions!

What are your development resolutions this new year? Some of the things I plan to work on include:

  1. Be more mindful about pull requests.
    This year I plan to spend at least 30 minutes reviewing code every morning. I want to pay careful attention both for the sake of learning and catching issues.

  2. Design and develop my own service: I’m looking forward to managing a project from the design phase through promotion to production this year.

  3. Get up to speed on interview questions. I have fallen out of practice with coding interviews and plan to brush up on my algorithms this year by practicing with friends or on interviewing.io.

  4. Take better care of my eyes. In honor of Sarhak’s dev.to post on eye care I plan to get blue tinted glasses and spend some time every 20 minutes bouncing a ball to give my eyes a screen time break.

  5. Update my terminal tools to make them nicer to use. I plan to spend some time updating my shortcuts and installing some visuals to make my terminal nicer to look at this year.

  6. Rather than complaining about processes that are broken, I want to get in the habit of changing what is broken. Often it just takes one person to fix a bad wiki page/process/communication pattern.

  7. Learn about design patterns. I plan to brush up on my design patterns by watching a video series like this one.

What are your development resolutions for the year? Consider adding goals related to learning, being a better engineer overall, and protecting your health.

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Top comments (4)

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nickfazzpdx profile image
Nicholas Fazzolari

Great resolutions! - 4 and 7 are big for me.

I'll add some of my own :D

1. Slow down with my personal projects: I have a dense CS coursework load. I need to stop trying to add 16 hours a week to personal software development work. I did it last term and it started to wear on me.

2. Learn a functional programming language: Open my "Learning Haskell" book this summer.

3. Get more involved and meet more devs: I'm at the point in my software developer career where I need to come out of my little academic shell and start networking. The imposters syndrome has retreated, and I'm confident enough in core topics that I feel like I can add something to the world of software development, even if the contributions are small.

Note: The Dev.to community has been overwhelmingly welcoming and positive, and I really appreciate that. I have lurked other online developer communities over the last few years and they made me weary of getting involved.

4. Continue to combine my skill sets: I have a strong background in graphic design (print and digital), and being touring musician in a post-punk band. I spend time thinking how these skills can be combined to help create human-centric, engaging software (I want to write a piece about this soon).

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brpaz profile image
Bruno Paz • Edited

Nice post ;)

Here are top the things I want to focus on in 2019:

1). Continue improving my knowledge of CI / CD and Development practices

With Tools like Kubernetes, Automated tests etc and do an example project with a complete pipeline including Unit tests, integration tests, contract tests, test environments by branch, integrations with Pull requests, Deploys via slack etc. The application could be really simple. The focus here is in the workflow.

2). Learn the basics of a VueJS and its Ecosystem.

I have specialized more on Backend work for the past years, but I like to know a bit of everything related to Web development and to be able to build an application from "Idea to production". To achieve that, I need to refresh my frontend skills. I dont want to be a Frontend expert and its almost impossible to be a complete full stack developer right now. Just knowing enough to be able to build something. Vue seems to be the best choice considering learning curve, tooling, community and popularity. I dont really like React and JSX.

3.) Build and launch some side project.

It doesn't need to be a complex thing or to become rich with it. Just ship something useful for someone. The skills from 1 and 2 will be useful here.

4). Continue improving my Golang knowlegde

I have been working with Go for the past months in my job and I really it. I want to continue working on it and become a pro ;)

I think its enough goals to start with ;)

Other interesting topics I might deep dive a little are Graphql, Typescript and Apache Kafka.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Those seem like really solid resolutions!

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kingsten profile image
Kingsten Banh

Awesome resolutions! I believe you will achieve them all :D