What I'm going to be learning in the year 2022

This year has been a pretty wild ride for me, from not having a job for almost a year then having multiple offers and then now ending up at a place I feel comfortable in. All in all I think I’ve made good decisions and I’m looking forward to more growth in the new year! 🚀

In terms of learning new things I don’t feel like I have done that a lot this year. Things in tech move pretty fast and it gets exhausting trying to keep up with everything that is happening but for the new year I want to change that. I have an itch to build things and try out all the stuff I’ve read about in the past year, and maybe actually follow through with finishing my side projects. Okay who are we kidding that won’t change.

For real though, I want to take my knowledge to the next level. I struggle with figuring out where I stand in terms of experience, I’m not quite a junior but also I feel my skills aren’t there yet to consider myself a senior developer. I know labels don’t really matter much but for myself I’d just like to figure out where I am. So, in the new year I’m going to reinforce the skills I already have and tackle some new things. Here’s what I plan to do.

New languages

I don’t really have much for this section, I’ve been learning Go on and off for probably about a year now but I haven’t really applied my learning. I hope to pair it with my learning of cloud technologies. Also I guess rust is all the rage now so maybe that will be worth while to learn, who knows.

Open source

One thing I’d really love to do is get involved with the open source commmunity whether it be something I make or contributing to another project. This is another thing I have fears about when it comes to being judged harshly for maybe not doing things the correct way. Also a lot of open source projects look pretty daunting. I know the contribution doesn’t have to be code all the time though so maybe I’ll focus my efforts on improving documentation first before trying to contribute some code.

Getting really good at CSS

I know people like to joke about CSS and say it’s really hard to work with and while there might be some truth to that I think it’s extremely worth while as a frontend developer to be really good at it. You can definitely get away with knowing the very basic stuff but I’ve seen some amazing website designs from people on twitter and I’d love to be able to get to that level. I did purchase Josh Comeau’s css course back when it was in preview for a good price. I got through most of the sections but work got in the way so I didn’t finish it. I plan on starting over from the beginning and finishing it.

Head in the clouds

After completing the CCP exam last year I started looking into possibly studying for the solutions architect exam for AWS next. It is slightly harder than the CCP exam but I have confidence that with enough preparation I will do fine. I do love learning about cloud technologies and this the career path I will likely end up going to sometime in the future. Kubernetes is another thing I tinkered with a bit this year which I plan on going back to and doing a deeper dive on also. Besides that I want to practice building out mock environments for small to medium business scenarios for fun and for practice.

Frameworks on Frameworks

As much as I love Next.js it would be foolish for me to not give kudos to the team behind Remix. My first impressions with it have been extremely positive and I want to try building some side projects with it as soon as possible! That isn’t to say that Vercel hasn’t been making some big moves this year either. Some new things introduced such as middleware, URL imports (holy shit), the new rust compiler and alpha support for React server components has me extremely excited for whats to come next year. Also them going on a hiring spree and picking up some of the brightest minds in tech seems pretty promising too.

Shipping more

The one thing I love about web development is how easy it is to get started with a project and share it with the world within a matter of minutes. I love the feeling of completing a project (which happens sometimes), hooking it up to a hosting site and then finding all of the bugs you missed during developement. There are definitely a ton of ideas I’d like to try shipping this year. A lot of this inspiration comes from watching people on twitter ship their side projects, sometimes they fail but they are quick to move onto something else and take the knowledge they’ve gained from a previous project and apply it to something new. I think what scared me before was the fear of failing or receiving harsh feedback on the ideas I have but I’m not going to let that stop me in the new year. 2022 is the year of shipping more!

Conclusion

I’ve definitely outlined a lot of stuff I want to do in the new year but I don’t think it’s impossible for me to complete. It’s just a matter of creating a plan and sticking to it. I hope by this time next year that I’ve gained a ton of knowledge and completed all the objectives I’ve laid out in this post.