2018 in Review
I had three simple goals for the last year:
- Become a better designer
- Get a job as a web developer
- Excerise regularly
I don't believe in SMART goals and all that corporate accountability nonsense...so did I meet those goals?
- Marginally
- YES!
- Not really
Design #
I became a marginally better designer, mostly by leaning on frameworks such as Material Design and spending a fair bit of time reasoning about the decisions they default to. I also spent a little time at the beginning of the year reading Hack Design, but to be honest, my commitment to that sorta fell away in early January!
Dev job #
This one was cool.
I started by putting a resume out on Twitter for feedback. I got some, and it was pretty useful. I also got a couple of connections out of it, including one recruiter that met with me in the city to discuss my prospects and interests. That ended up going nowhere, but he did suggest that I go to to the MelbJS meetup.
I missed the meetup, but went the following month. In the interim I applied for a bunch of jobs, and scored a couple of interviews.
The first interview was with a company whose entire product is a couple of webforms that get embedded on their client's sites with some backend processing. My job would have been to style the forms to match the client aesthetic. It was basically just a CSS job, and it paid penuts. I didn't get it.
The second interview was for a company that didn't traditionally do web development at all, but they were expanding to providing web services in their industry. Seemed like a cool job, but they wanted someone with more experience.
Then I went to the meetup. I met my current boss there :)
The job has been pretty cool, and ended up being way more complex and interesting than either of the jobs I didn't get.
Excercise Regularly #
Yeah, nah...I think I went for a run 4 times this year. I did get moderately good at PLUNKBAT mobile though.