Goals for 2020: six-month progress check
We're officially halfway through the year... so let's take a look at what goals I set myself (original post) and how I'm getting on with them:
Be less reliant on Chrome✅- Post at least once a week ❌
- Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge ❌
- Continue to grow as a designer (ongoing)
- Broaden front end skills (ongoing)
Be less reliant on Chrome
Let's start with the good news:
I've gone full @firefox 🦊
— Ben (@bengammon) January 15, 2020
I'd been a long time admirer of Firefox and in particular, its Developer Tools. They're also a not-for-profit and you get a lot of additional privacy and cookie blocking out-of-the-box. A no-brainer, really.
Switching was easy, with a quick export of bookmarks from Chrome. I don't really use bookmarks anymore. At the very least I need to sort through them. Maybe.
Had one slight hiccup with Firefox whereby the 1Password plugin I was using stopped working. However, I eventually found a solution for it.
Post at least once a week
Back in January, some smart arse said this:
Most of the time this one should be easy
Yet here we are in week 23 of 2020 and I've posted just 6 times (and one of those was the 'Goals for 2020' post). Yikes.
This one is frustrating as it should be easy. One post a week is not a huge amount of work, especially when it can simply be just documenting something cool or interesting that I've seen or read about online.
I really want to get to the end of the year with at least 52 posts in 2020. Content volume has always been a sticking point on this site and from now on I would like 52 posts to be the minimum amount of new content posted per year.
Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge
The lack of any progress on this goal is probably the most disappointing of them all. Improving past a basic knowledge of JavaScript has always been something that I've wanted to achieve and it constantly gets put off.
I recently signed up to Dan Abramov's Just JavaScript for more daily snippets and have been enjoying the content so far.
I'll be making a conscious effort to make sure a considerable portion of my weekly posts are JavaScript related from now on.
Broaden front end skills
As this is an ongoing goal it's hard to quantify it. There won't ever be a point where I look back and say that I'm happy where I am - I can always learn more.
CSS continues to be a keen interest and I'm excited to see how my knowledge of CSS Grid (in particular) grows and what it enables me to do in the browser.
This particular goal will also be vastly improved if I can nail down the previous goal of becoming more competent with JavaScript. This is definitely a priority.
Continue to grow as a designer
Recently, my work has had more of a front end focus. I haven't had to design much from scratch. But, design is so much more than that and there has still been plenty of opportunity to improve my UX knowledge and help clients understand the reasoning behind certain design decisions.
As with broadening my skills, this is a goal that won't ever be finished. But it's always worth reflecting on how far you have come and challenging yourself to keep improving.
Conclusion
Quite a bit has changed since the start of the year. I feel like a six month review is probably not frequent enough to keep tabs on my progress, as things can easily fall by the wayside if not regularly checked.
Quarterly reviews would be better but probably still isn't enough. So, I'm going to start doing monthly reviews. This will give me a chance to review the work I've done and the things I've posted, whilst they're still fresh in my mind.