Year in Review: 2023
Well there you have it! 2023 has come to a close… I have never really done a year review to look back on all the cool things I have accomplished, struggled through, or even worked through in the last year before, but seeing Aaron Francis do his has really sparked an interest to writing mine, for both professional work and personal. This has been an extremely wild year with tremendous growth in my skills. Well. What have I worked on this year?
-
Refactored a major feature from React into Vue to completely remove the React framework from our codebase, thus enabling versioning in our Webpack Bundler which helped a lot of our machines keep up to date on version changes instead of manually clearing the cache every time we push a breaking change.
-
Spearheaded a launch of our E-commerce Project, through the ups and downs we updated the architecture and ported over an entire Admin Dashboard of over 20 different entities from Code Igniter over to Laravel. Moving us towards the ability to create new features and analytical changes to start giving us more hands on data with what we can improve on in 2024, as UA4 with Google Analytics has been an entire letdown.
-
Started working on a Merchant Center Application that utilizes NextJS with GraphQL using the Apollo Client. Learning the best practices with that has been delightful and interesting to say the least. Has totally made me rethink how to re-fetch data and cache data as we can no longer utilize browser specific caching systems.
-
Got a tiny promotion to be an Engineering Lead in which I have a single developer that I manage and work with. This has been a ton of fun and has improved me in so many ways of collaboration as he comes directly to me for a lot of questions and decisions for the product. Which has been a huge undertaking, but I am proud in the progress that I am seeing and directly making an impact in my organization in this way has matured me in a lot of ways!
-
Got my Product Owner Certification to better provide stability in our Products. I now talk directly with shareholders to better discuss what tasks to prioritize for our product instead of passing features and bugs down to our engineers to just mindlessly tap tap tap through. This has been a blessing, as now my entire team knows our whys behind what we prioritize and when.
Conferences!!!
This has been an absolute huge year with me attending multiple conferences! Some include:
- KCDC
- LaraconUS
- APIConference
Wrote a blog post using Medium on a system design pattern: State Machines. Which ended up becoming its own Slide deck for a company wide Lunch and Learn!! Which was totally sick to do, and I plan to do more as I dive into other design patterns.
Traveling and Experiences
I did my fair share of traveling and experiencing the world as this year I turned 21 which meant I can totally drink at airports (not that I did ;))
- Spent my 21st Birthday in Copenhagen, Denmark alone! (This was the most spiritually awakening trip I have ever done in my life)
- Explored the country nightlife of Nashville
- Felt the cool breeze of the Ocean inside of The Gulf of Mexico in Navarre, Florida
- Immediately after I went and Wing Walked in Santa Paula, California! Touching both Oceans in a span of a week!
- Celebrated the life of a extremely close loved one back home in Vegas (driving 29 hours non stop was not the ideal situation under those emotions)
Absolutely 2024 will be a more thrilling ride, but a slower one to say the least.
Trying more things to see what works
With me spending so much money on travel this year, I plan to stick to less travel and clear up my debt! Have already planned it out and I should be able to come on top of that this year! (Hooray!) I keep saying I am going to start finding out more ways to write content and I think I am just going to get up and do it. I have a ton of free time and I am already planning a few projects that I will be able to write content on while I work through them!
Musically
I am always loved music, this year I am going to take some piano seriously as I have been dabbling in a 66 key Yamaha piano through this year every so often just practicing songs, going to be writing some content on my experiences as I actually take piano Lessons for the first time in my life as an adult.
Blocker Tasks
I have an absolute TON of blocker tasks. I have been planning and planning to get a blog website together so I can have an easier avenue to just output content, but with that is a huge undertaking and I just shrug it off. So no content gets written and I keep pushing and pushing it off. Which is why I randomly sprung this page together quickly to get this out before 2024 without building out a whole system for my blogs to actually live just yet. This year I plan to write out blocker tasks and actually pursue them to finally get them off my todos, thus making systems that will benefit me in the long run.
Looking deep into 2024
As I am looking towards 2024, I will focus on finding and developing systems that will better benefit me as a person and me as a professional. 2023 has been a year of growth that has becoming more and more stagnant, and I do not want that to start haggling me and laying off the gas. I want to pick up the pace while things are becoming clearer and easier. Developing skills, improving my network and reaching into untapped oppurtunities and experiences. Letting go of what does not work, and tapping into what could work, even if it doesn’t will become my objective. The theme is clear, and I am excited to pounce onto finding creative ways to pursue Content Creation and enhancing my brand. Maybe even applying to talk at a conference…
Health and Wellbeing
I actually am going to be hitting up and attending my first Rave this year (boots and cats and boots and cats..) with that I would like to be in a better state health wise. I have been dealing with a bit of a eating disorder for a long time where I eat snacks throughout the day and only eat a single meal besides that going hungry most of the rest of the day which leads me to eat anything and everything. To target this I have made it a goal to learn at least 15 different unique meals to prep and allow myself to eat those meals when I am hungry instead of eating easy snacks that don’t require any prep. As well as targeting my physique, but that is just another 2024 Resolution huh.
ALL GAS NO BREAKS
As I have said it before, I am young, this is my (work work work) era. I cannot allow myself to fall behind the pact just because I have somewhat made it for myself. Someday I will be able to sit back and relax, but 2024 will not be that year. I absolutely love what I do and it is only time to grind at this further. Throughout the year this may take shape differently than I imagine, but hey. That’s all a part of the journey in this life. And I am excited to see what happens...