2021 Recap and 2022 Goals

At the end of every year usually, I check my goals for the current year and I set them for the next year.
This is an activity that helps me to improve my skill build step by step career.

Building a career it’s difficult sometimes because you don’t know what you want next or what you want to achieve.
For this reason, I take some days to understand it and try to design the next steps for my career.
Sometimes I need to change a lot of things but it’s important to follow our dream.

Remember that a career is more than a job and every company (or most of them) is hiring developers.

So my goals for 2021 were:
- read more than 30 books
- learn React
- 5 meetup as a speaker
- write at least 5 articles
- release phparkitect

Read more than 30 books

I have read a lot of articles about:
“You need to read at least 20 books, 30 books 50 books..”

I have taken this advice and I set the goal of 30 books for 2021.
In the first three months, I read about 8 books and I was really happy about it.
But I decided to think about this behavior and what I’m trying to achieve in 2021.

My goal is not to read 30 books, my goal is to improve my skill, get a new point of view. So my goal is to learn not to read books only to check from my list this goal.

I decided to stop for a moment and change this behavior.
After that, I take my books and I continue to reading them more slowly, getting notes and thinking about what they try to share.
I have created a template in Notion to track my books and notes inside.
I started to create a visual mapping with Miro and at the end of the year I don’t achieve my goal of 30 books, I read 18 books but I am really satisfied with what I have learned in a year.

So it’s time to share the 3 best books that I have read this year:
- Antifragile
- Startup, Scaleup, Screwup
- The goal

Learn React

Another goal for my 2021 was to learn React, and to learn React I meant to write a single page application with components and test obviously.
I have reached the goal before June following some articles and tutorials.
I did an application useful to manage my bank account.

I started watching some tutorials and create my first react Kata project.
A Kata is a project to learn something new without thinking about the idea. You can try new approaches, frameworks, and languages.

My first kata project with React was a simple to-do list where I had to create a list, edit it and view it.
After this, I have complicated the to-do list project with some features to understand well hooks and best practices.

5 meetup as a speaker

In 2021 I did exactly 5 talks:
- PugRomagna 2 talks about hexagonal architecture in Symfony and another one about smart working
- JUG Milano about hexagonal architecture in Kotlin
- Ticino Software Craft about hexagonal architecture in Kotlin
- PugRoma about hexagonal architecture

Speaking activities are moments where you share something with other people but you are learning at the same time because you need to study concepts deeply to explain them to others.
It’s important to open your mind to questions and different points of view.
Every time that I did a talk I learned something and I met a lot of clever developers, I recommend to all the developers to try to share their knowledge with others because it’s a moment to network and learn together every time.

Write at least 5 articles

In 2021 I wrote
- Why you should deploy on Friday without fear
- How dotfiles can save you a lot of time
- Push and publish Docker images with GitHub Actions
- Learning a new programming language
- PHPArkitect: Put your architectural rules under test!

It was very interesting to write these articles because explaining to others in a fluent and clear article sometimes could be difficult.
I tried to write small articles and answer all their questions.
Sometimes people contact me in private asking for advice or doubts about the article and their projects, and I am very happy to answer them and ask for a different point of view if it’s possible.

Release PHParkitect

The last goal was to release PHPArkitect in 2021.
It’s a library that helps you to keep your PHP codebase coherent and solid, by permitting you to add some architectural constraint check to your workflow.
The team is made up of a couple of people and I am one of them.
We developed the tool all year and we released it to all the world in May.
Nowadays we are working to improve the library day by day and at the moment we are using it in some projects.
I think that there are a lot of features to be done to improve the library.

Feel free to try it and give me feedback, please!

Goals 2022

For 2022 I take some hours and I walk alone to understand what I would like to achieve next year.
Learning sometimes could be easy but focusing on the right things it’s difficult.

I thought about my career path and what I can do in the next years and I understand that this year I would like to:

- learn typescript because I think that it could be a good solution for many projects
- read books that can help me to improve my hard skill and soft skill. I wrote a list of books that can help me, and these are the first two books that I will read: Clean Craftsmanship, Learning Domain-Driven Design
- do at least 3 talks to continue my career as a speaker
- write at least 10 articles to share my knowledge and to understand deeply some concepts to share

At the moment these are my goals for 2022, I have scheduled some moments to check every point, and write down a path to achieve them during the year.
It’s important not only to understand your goal but it’s important to measure them and create a path to understand how to achieve them.

To do it you need to ask yourself:
- What is the definition of done to understand if this goal is achieved or not?
- How can I achieve this goal?

Answering these questions you can understand well your next steps to improve yourself and your career.

Creating your career it’s one of the most difficult things to do because it depends on you usually.
You need to understand where do you want to go and what are next steps to achieve your goals.

It’s a never-ending path but could be amazing, it depends on you!