Once again, one of my new-year resolution will be to write more blog posts. So, to start on a good note (even before 2019!), I wanted to write about what I did and did not achieve this year.

What were my goals in 2018?

Those were my main objectives when it comes to programming for 2018:

  • write a blog post a week
  • make my first dollar from one of my side projects
  • do more Leetcode problems
  • get better at devops work

How did it go?

Write a blog post a week

Result: Didn’t happen! 🙁

I feel like I don’t have a lot of interesting things to explain. I still struggle to go into a lot of details when it comes to explaining solutions to programming issues. I decided on writing blog posts to just explain what I work on and how I approach problems I have no idea how to go about.

Make my first dollar from one of my side-projects

Result: Didn’t happen! 🙁

Unfortunately, I had to shut-down my main side-project and have been started a few new ones but abandoned most of them as I discovered the idea was not great or already done.

Do more Leetcode problems

Result: Kind of happened!

I did a few problems here and there but wasn’t dedicated enough to do them every other day. I was either too busy/tired with work, or simply doing something else.

Get better at devops work

Result: It happened!

On that front, I think I made a lot of progress. I digged a lot more into AWS, debugged and fixed a few tough issues related to some of our Docker containers for a service I worked on at Adroll. I also worked on a side-project where I made use of ECS, and tinkered with writing some nice deployments scripts. This project is a perfect toy-project as it started with a simple SQLite DB, no caching, no queues and local storage of files on the container itself (making it pretty useless), but I am making it production ready by switching to RDS, S3, SQS and so on. It also made me realize that I really like working on developer tools, as I am usually able to use it for myself so it adds extra motivation.

What are my goal for 2019?

  • write a blog post per week.
  • make my first dollar from one of my side projects.
  • read more technical books, aiming for 12 a year.
  • do more public speaking (tech talks, meetups)
  • contribute more to open-source.
  • release a Flutter app.
  • tinker with Arduino.