2020 Year in Review
Intro
I'm going to skip over talking about the obvious things that happened in 2020 and talk about this years accomplishments, failiars and takeaways.
This year I made major leaps in my personal development as a software engineer. First of all, I became a real software engineer. As in I finally got a job as a software engineer. This was a years long pursute but I finally stopped making excuses and got to work on this goal back in 2019. I've already written about this at leangh here.
I wrote 9 blog posts
I managed to write 9 blog posts here on my blog. This is really strange for me since I don't think of myself as a writer and when this blog started I was not super sure what I had to bring to the table. But, I was following the advice of some really smart people and I think it's been great so far. Going into 2021 I hope to write more about what I'm learning, as I'm learning so that this can be a useful reference for future Karnell or anyone else interested in these things.
Split the year in half
Over the first half of 2020 I spent most of my energy doing one of two things. Learning everything I could to become the best candidate I could for my future employeer. Or looking for a employeer.
Launching this blog was a big part of the beginning of 2020 for me. I used this blog as a reason to learn things like Next.js and styled-components and plenty more. If you're looking for a project to create and don't already have a blog, make one!
In the second half of the year I secured a web developer role. With that I spent my time learning everything it takes to be a productive member of a team. Everything from Agile, Jira, Git, Stand-ups and the list goes on and on. These are the things that people don't really talk about when they get a new job but as it turns out these things take up most of your time as a new web dev (At least at a large company/In my experince).
My favorite blog post of mine this year was How to useRef. It's my favorite because it was the hardest post to make and took the most time and reviewing. But also it's what I want the future of this blog to look like. It's technical, has examples and in general is the kind of post that I love to check out on others blogs.
It's been a few months since I first wrote that post. But I feel like I've learned so much more about useRef and how to useRef from real world experience. Maybe I'll come back to this article and update or re-release it in 2021?
I quit my Open-Source Project 🧼
I think i'd like to write a full post about this. But in short I decided that I no longer wanted to contribute to a open source project that I was working on. You can find the project here. The stress of working on this project was a bit too much for me this year. But I'm thankful for the chance to work on it and the things i've learned from working on it.
My Favories of 2020
blogs
- Love to get a email notifacation about a new post to her blog. Tania Rascia - https://www.taniarascia.com/
- The Goat. Kent C. Dodds - https://kentcdodds.com/blog/
Courses
- Epic React - I've taken about 60% of this couse at the time of writing this post. But I love it. If you're got the money to spare or better yet can get your company to pay for it, do it!
- Flexbox Zombies - I wrote a review for this one on this blog.
- LevelUp Tutorials - I'm still a subscriber here but lately i've been getting less value that I did in the past. I don't think the quality has changed, it's still very good. But maybe my needs or focused has changed a bit from when I was really rocking with them heavy. Going to check back in with this later in 2021 to see what's up.
Podcasts
- React Podcast - I think this is the web dev pod I look forward to the most
- Code Newbie - Great inspo for someone learning to code. I still listen. Love the way the host speaks and asks questions. Does not get better.
- Syntax - Scott and Wes always keeping me up to date. My one cretique is that I don't like how the ads are rolled into the content so closely.
- Full Stack Radio - Great conversations
Taking L's
Failiars or things I wanted to do but never got around to
Looking at my list of post ideas I see there are many things I'm not longer interested in writting about. I'm not going to be too stressed about not getting to those things. However, I think my biggest L is and was not tracking my wins at work.
I want to make a big "database"(that's the name for it in Notion) with all of the jira tickets and tasks that I've completed or worked on. This kind of thing is soooo useful for reviews and starting conversation with your manager. Specifically when it comes time to talk about promotions and making more money. It's just a lot more simple to convince someone of your progress, growth and impact when you've got data to back that up. This is something I will do in Q1 of this year, maybe I'll post about it.
- Testing, I don't know much about it. I don't write tests. It's a weaknees of mine. I need to fix that. Next year I hope to have more to say about this.
- I tried to learn to type the 'correct' way. But failed. I want to try again.
- Adding dynamic routing on this blog. It's a headache to add new posts at the moment.
- Learning Swedish. Need to really stop playing around and do it!
I made 659 contributions in Github
I don't put much stock into this. But I can remember back when I had very few contributions and this graph looked really weak. I made a plan to try to get a green dot everyday in the hopes that a recruiter would see that and see that I was serious about becoming a developer. Don't know if that helped at all or if anyone ever saw it. Now that I have a job I can care less what this looks like. It's like "likes" on Instagram or something like that.
I'm looking forward to 2021.