It’s the beginning of a New Year and everyone is reflecting on their achievements from 2018 with year in review posts. But here we look towards the future and don’t reflect on the past!1
Kidding aside year in review posts are a great motivator when you see some of the amazing work people are putting in across the web. They help to shape my goals for what’s possible for myself in the next year, and that’s what I want to dig into here.
Learn JavaScript Deeply
This has been a bit of an ongoing goal for the last couple of years, but things really kicked into gear in 2018. Thanks in part to a deep dive into building blocks for the Gutenberg editor and the modern JavaScript that involves.
Giving a presentation at WordCamp St. Louis 2018 on building blocks with Gutenberg was really the kick in the pants to get that learning underway. In 2019 I want to increase that by taking on some projects implementing blocks and using WordPress as a headless CMS.
Resources:
- The Wes Bos course catalog: JavaScript 30, ES6 for Everyone, React for Beginners, Advanced React
- Zac Gordon’s JavaScript for WP courses
- Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke
- JavaScript for Web Designers by Mat Marquis
- Human Made JavaScript Engineering Handbook
- CourseDuck’s Best JavaScript Courses
Grow my Newsletter
I actually started sending out a regular newsletter in 2018. Hitting 33, mostly, weekly newsletters with a focus on brevity covering topics related to WordPress. Though some got a little long.
2018 saw my site sessions increase 235% and pageviews shoot up 143%. My newsletter growth has been more modest but is now approaching 100 active subscribers. Not numbers to blow your socks off, but it’s a start.
In 2019 I’m going to focus on sharing WordPress Cheat Codes to share code snippets and tips to improve your development workflow.
Identify Knowledge Gaps and Fill Them
In honor of Dan Abramov’s great post on things he doesn’t know I’m going to spend time identifying my knowledge gaps and work to fill them in. At least where it’s beneficial.
Aside from JavaScript I’ll be starting with…
Really Get a Handle on Caching
I want to stop asking people if they’ve cleared their cache in 2019. I can’t tell how much time I’ve wasted debugging issues to find out someone on the team forgot to clear a cache after pushing to production.
Understanding the basics of caching is one thing, but I want to get into the intricacies of the various caching options (Redis, OP Cache, etc, etc.) available and how to best deal with them.
Put Together a Course
As I mentioned earlier the research and studying to get ready for my Gutenberg presentation at WordCamp St. Louis was a big driver for learning JavaScript.
One of the things I’ve had on my list for awhile is to release a course. I don’t know exactly what the focus will be yet, but it’s something I’d definitely love to do this year.
Launch Stuff
2018 was chock full of learning and growing, but I don’t feel like I launched many of the ideas I’ve had. In 2019 I plan to kick off a few side projects with little expectation other than they’ll be great learning experiences.
First up on the list is getting my latest theme, used for this site, released on WordPress.org. Then get some pro features added on top for my theme site Themes.pizza. So if it doesn’t happen soon call me out in the comments.
Resources:
Figure out Who Threw an Egg at My Garage Door
Seriously, come on people! I don’t know who I have made enemies with. I’m going with youths and mistaken house identity. But I’ll review the Nest footage and publicly shame them with a grainy video of their car.
Wrapping Up
These goals will likely shift over the course of the year. But it’s a starting point. I suggest you get your broad goals setup and start breaking them down into actionable steps so you can start on the path to achieving them so come 2020 you can write your own year in review post.