2012 has been a great year for me overall. 2011 was the year in which I became much more focused on my future and realized I had to make some big decisions. 2012 was the year in which those decisions really started to pay off. I started doing web development full time at the start of 2012. I feel incredibly lucky to be doing something I truly love and enjoy. When I reflect on the past year it's obvious that my main focus was on learning and doing more web development.
The programming knowledge I have now compared to January of last year is, in my opinion, an incredible difference. It seems that the more I learn the more I realize how much I do not know or how much farther I have to go. That is actually an encouraging thought. There is so much room to grow in the web development field that things are almost never boring. It is a constant learning process.
The biggest change in my life by far in 2012 was moving to a big city (Chicago). I grew up in a very small town (Pendleton, IN - population 4,000). Moving farther away from home and experiencing life in a big city has definitely helped me grow as a person. I still don't want to live in a big city in the long term, but I discovered many aspects of city life that I enjoy.
- It's much easier to meet like minded people
- Somehow it actually makes the world feel smaller
- You can get around fairly easily without a car
- Networking and professional growth is significantly easier
What I am most proud of
- Experiencing big city living for the first time
- Doing web development full time
- Exploring my passion for programming and making huge leaps in my programming knowledge
- Finding a girl I love
- Taking a 3 month training program for learning Ruby on Rails
- Releasing my own open source software for the first time
- Starting to blog
Shortcomings - What I could have done better
- Maintain a healthy diet
- Maintain a regular sleep schedule
- Track short term goals
- Write more blog posts
Goals for 2013
- Turn my shortcomings into strengths
- Make significant contributions to open source software
- Teach programming to help others and increase my own knowledge
- Create software that helps people
- Save enough to get a mortgage in 2014
