It has become a tradition of mine every year to look back and see what I have accomplished, and set goals for myself for the coming year. This year was a crazy one, with moving across the country, but overall it was a good one!
YouTube
In my 2017 Year End Review, I mentioned growing my YouTube channel. This was definitely easier said than done. As of writing this post, I am at 256 subscribers, which is good, but not what I expected. I will still continue to make videos (which I haven't done in a while). I'm currently putting together a pretty cool project with FitBit that I will be sharing on a short series in the near future.
My greatest YouTube achievement this year would definitely be the Intro to Game Dev series. I was shocked to get an email from FreeCodeCamp, asking to use the series on their channel. It was an awesome opportunity to get my content shared to thousands of users, and received a lot of good feedback.
Blog
I only posted 9 posts this year, which I'm a bit ashamed of. I want my blog to be a place to share as much of my knowledge as possible. My goal this year is to post at least twice each month. I admit that the last quarter of this year I have felt very burnt out, and have not been motivated to do much outside of work. Side projects have been put on hold, videos were never recorded, and my blog remained stagnant. I plan to also add a newsletter to the site, and try to grow the audience. As it sits right now, I receive approximately 100 users per week. I'd like to grow this to at least 250.
One accomplishment that I had during this time of burnout was the redesign of my website. It took me a long time to settle on what I wanted, and OxygenBuilder greatly helped.
I have started a blog series about making money using affiliate marketing. The first post was a simple introduction to the project. I will be posting about the project in the next week or so, followed by monthly updates on where the project stands, and what the earnings have been like.
Podcasts
One major, and unexpected, thing that happened early this year, was I was invited to join the Nerd Continuity podcast. I have been honored to be part of it, and look forward to many more episodes to come.
As for Laravel, last year I spoke about how I was new to it. This year, I really feel like I've grown as a Laravel developer, and was able to attend Laracon this year. I plan to attend again in 2019! If you are attending, let me know in the comments, and we can meet up at one of the social events!
Goals
So, here are my goals for 2019:
- Earn at least $100 in a given month via affiliate marketing. I think this is an aggressive goal, but what's a goal if it's not a challenge? This will fully be documented in the series I mentioned above.
- Delve into .NET Core. I really like working with Laravel, but I do miss C# as a language. I want to work on some projects utilizing .NET Core (and may use it in the upcoming FitBit app).
- Teach programming tips / tricks. I have a lot of little tidbits of information I'd like to start giving away on my twitter account. I really like the way Steve Schoger shared design tips, and I'd like to use him as inspiration to share code tips.
Thanks for reading, and have a happy 2019!