Goodbye 2023, Hello 2024

Joining with the theme of the new year, it's that time where we all set ourselves goals and reflect on the previous year. Previously, I have never been one to set goals with a serious intention to achieve them, they've always been nice-to-have's and I've lived with the mindset of taking 1 day at time and seeing where life takes me. This time I am going to set goals with the intentions of putting effort into reaching them.

Reflection

Looking back onto the past year, there is not much to write about. If we are keeping this strictly career focused, then the best thing to happen was my new job I started. In March I switched companies, still within the financial industry, but a completely different area of focus. The new role has been very exciting, I've met a bunch of amazing developers who every day teach me something new. This year I also managed to finally launch this unfinished website, and I created an instagram account where I can nerd-out about coffee.

New Year

Moving into the new year, I plan on keeping things steady, I'm not going to rush to do 100 things starting on 1st January, but try and ramp up as the weeks/months go by. Firstly, in 3 months time it'll be my 1 year anniversary at my job, and I don't plan on jumping ship for hopefully a few more years. However, I do plan on trying to add extra work in the form of freelance. To help with my goal of becoming more financially stable this year, I'm looking to work on getting small freelance clients. Not only will this help me financially, it'll improve my skills which I can take back to my full-time job, and gain me more confidence in my dev skills and social communication.

Next up, side-projects! And to call myself out, we all have them, most of us never continue them. My first side-project is this blog, I plan to continue attempting to write content as best as I can, as a learning experience for myself. I've got a niche idea for something coffee related that would be fun to build, turns out my coffee app idea has 3-4 people already smashing it, so I'll be passing on that one.

Lastly, as far as career goes that is, I want to work on the social side, making friends and being part of a community. The first part of this is locally, as in my area twice a month, there is a software developer meet up, I hope to attend it on the months our family schedule allows. If I meet my first goal on financial stability through freelance, I'd also like to join the local co-working space, as I work-from-home 100% of the time. Next is online, I have a very small following of awesome devs, and I follow a lot of brilliant devs too. I'd love to get involved in contributions, discussions, be able to provide knowledge to peers, and build meaningful connections with people. As I'm still on a journey of learning, and feel like I am still at the beginning, it's felt almost like I've always taken from the community but never provided, this shall be the year that can change.

Happy New Year

Thank you for taking this time to read this ramble, if you'd like to follow me on this journey, please connect with me on X (it's still Twitter to me).

As a quick TL;DR: Keep my awesome job, small freelance work, become financially stable, build awesome things, and meet amazing people ❤️

I hope you all have a fantastic new year, and achieve your goals.
Happy New Year, and have a great 2024.