Home

2015 Resolutions

Published on

So, a lot happened this year.

I graduated from college, ran a Design Show, explored Iceland, Dublin, London, Croatia, Montenegro, New York, and San Francisco. I built a cli, a chrome extension, made a few sass gifs, built a new online portfolio, migrated my blog to Github and my web server to Digital Ocean.

I learned to trust strangers half way across the world, canceled all my plans for a week, and joined an impromptu road trip through southeastern Europe.

I got a job, bought a car, and drove half way across the country. I moved three times this year, and ended up in Austin, Texas. I gave a quick talk at Sass Conf, spoke at 2 meetups, was on Sass Bites, helped organize SassyDC and start the ATX Sass Meetup (so much Sass!). I participated in hackathons, game jams, open sourced my personal goals, wrote a bunch of blog posts, got pretty good at working with Gulp, used Meteor.js, Express.js, played with a few different templating libraries, and contributed to open source for the first time. I ran two half marathons, learned calligraphy, and learned how to use Vim more effectively.

How am I Doing On My Personal Goals?

These are the Overarching Goals I outlined in October.

So that’s not too bad, but there’s still a lot to work on. And that’s exactly what I’ll be focusing on next year.

2015: Just Do It.

Just do it. Get up and go. Fuck it, ship it. That’s my plan. I’ve got a lot of ideas and a lot of interests. Here are a few coming down the pipeline, by which I am going to clean up and restructure my public personal goals by (because they got a little messy) after New Years day.

Professional

Professionally, I want to get better at harnessing the power of JavaScript (sounds so epic, right?). This includes learning node.js and understanding core concepts better, as well as practicing more often with MV* Frameworks and testing. I don’t use these much at work, but I want to be as fluent in JavaScript (not just jQuery) as I am in Sass.

I also want to continue speaking and getting involved in community. This includes the open source design community, being a Sassvocate, making people care about performance, and being a better advocate of STEM for girls (specifically in middle school, but really of all ages). I want to speak at conferences and continue to run ATXSass with a smile. This year I’ll be more organized :)

Projects in the Pipeline

I’m getting an arduino for the holidays (New Years is my family’s holiday) and can’t wait to get started with it. I have a few ideas already. I am also going to reinstate one of my older projects with a new name, Heiroglyph and try to be as open source about the design and development of that as much as possible. I’m doing some free development and design work for a non-profit called Urban Patchwork that I met at a hackathon.

As of last week, I was sort-of Twitter challenged to start a podcast. And because of my love for auditory learning, and since I don’t see that many out there, I’m going to start Caret Cast early next year. I want to create a typeface and learn about web scraping to improve the Sass Docs CLI I wrote. I’ll continue blogging and playing around with libraries and frameworks as I learn about them.

Personal

All of my personal goals center around health and connectivity. I want to get fit again. A way that has worked for me before is to simply start counting my calories, no matter what, for every meal, every day. And since I’m a nerd, to make it more fun, I want to do something with this data. I haven’t decided what that will be yet, but I’m trying to get access to the MyFitnessPal API to be able to extract my realtime info. I want to run another half marathon, so I’d better start running again too :P Oh and I’m going to sign up for a dance class because I really miss dancing and it makes me happy.

I want to be better at staying in touch with some of the incredible people I’ve met over the past few years. I want to pay better attention to their lives and surprise them with random gifts and letters because everyone deserves that.

I also plan on traveling to Asia. I might go to China in February, but its pretty last minute, so I’m more looking to going to Thailand in April. We’ll see what happens when I get there, but I’ll definitely be traveling. A weekend trip to Colorado or a roadtrip to Marfa could be fun, too.

So that’s what my year is looking like right now. But I know that plans change, and I’m going to embrace whatever comes my way in 2015 :) See y’all on the flip side!