I try to make goals and track them fairly often, but the end of a year is a good time to look back at the past twelve months, and to make plans for the coming year.
In a way, I'd hoped that 2018 would be a year where life slowed down a bit. Following a year where I graduated and got my first job, this year was supposed to be relatively steady. Of course, it was far from that – not that that's a bad thing at all.
I gave my first ever tech talk at The Lead Developer conference, closely followed by another talk at FullStack London. This was a brilliant experience and I'm glad I pushed myself to do it, but there's no denying that it was difficult, too. In the past I've always found public speaking difficult, and whilst I found tonnes of useful resources to help along the way (and had super-supportive organisers at both conferences), I honestly felt burnt out having finished. This was a firm reminder that it's okay to step back and take some time for yourself once in a while. I definitely have even more respect and appreciation for frequent speakers, now that I've been there myself.
Having discovered Codebar at the start of the year, I also started mentoring, and absolutely loved it. Unfortunately I haven't found the time for this in the second half of the year – that will change in 2019. I've also been helping to organise Codebar monthlies, and met lots of great people in the process.
The biggest change (and perhaps the most exciting) been joining Deliveroo. I'm so fortunate to be working with such an amazing bunch of people, at a company I'm genuinely excited about. Pretty pumped for the year ahead.
The one thing I'd like to change next year is the amount of screen time. I certainly spent too much time scrolling through Twitter this year (I'm sure I'm not the only one), and not enough time creating. Perhaps that's a blog post in itself, though…