A year in review, what's coming 📆

I am back from a well deserved holiday and thought first thing first, I should review the last year and set some goals for the new one to be able to focus my energy to the right direction and learn from any mistake or missed opportunities.

A review on 2019

Last year was a super hectic year for me personally. I was working a full time consultancy job, advancing in my public speaking journey (more on this later), kicking some goals and missing others. All in all, it was a year with some 'wow great' and some 'oh boy' moments.

But let me start with the good parts first:

• Learnt so many new topics and concepts.
• Spoke at 8 major conferences and 7 meetups.
• Got promoted to lead consultant.
• Published 38 blog post.
• Restarted going to gym two to three times a week.
• Started on Dev.to and reached 15K followers, 170K post views, 6.5K reactions.
• Published two npm packages.
• Contributed to Open Source.
• Read 60 books 🤯 (technical and non-technical).
• Finished 10 side projects.
• Met so many amazing people and made new friends.
• And finished up with a position as a developer advocate for TelstraDev.

It was so good and I couldn't believe what a little motivation could do.

However, this came with a cost, I felt nearly burnt down and exhausted from all of these activities, so I reduced them towards the end of the year and gave myself some time to recover. I didn't touch Twitter (apart from posting some photos of my woodworking), didn't check LinkedIn, read some books, restarted woodworking, enjoyed doing nothing basically.

I don't want to go through too much detail, overall it was a great year.

2020, where to?

Starting 2020 for me was a with mixed feelings. I wanted to fix some errors I made last year, but at the same time I had to take some tough decisions. So here are my 2020 goals:

• Be a better person.
• Read more books.
• Publish more targeted blog posts.
• Take good care of my body and mind.
• Learn more, listen more, talk less.
• Continue public speaking, but be more selective, get more invitation, maybe a keynote/locknote, help others get started.
• Be a caring and mindful advocate for developers out there.
• Continue woodworking, spend more time with family, and spend less of weekends on technical subjects to balance lifestyle.
• Be more productive by sleeping more, eating healthy food, and more exercise.
• Make new friends, surround myself with good people.
• And a nice to have one is to start a video podcast on web and front end.

This list is not a far fetched list, it's a carefully drafted one based on last year's review and feedback.

And I am so grateful for the support I've received by all of you. Keep your positive energy coming and stay tuned for some quality content coming up.