2022 was a year of much needed stability for me. After working for 5 different companies last year and living in 3 different cities, I finally found a place I fit in and a job I love. I've been at Vercel now for a little over a year and got to work on lots of cool projects, traveled within the US, and spent a lot of quality time with my family. I'm incredibly grateful for all the opportunities I've had in 2022 and the people I've met along the way.

2022 highlights

Here are some of my highlights from 2022:

Coded 15 web apps
Organized 3 Vercel meetups in 3 different cities
Made 6 short twitter videos
Helped run one of the largest conferences for web devs: Next.js Conf
Contributed 30 PRs to different open source projects, mostly Next.js
Got promoted at my job to Senior Developer Advocate
Made friends in SF, Austin, & Miami

2022 evaluation

Looking back at my goals for the year, they were to:

Become a great frontend developer
Build better personal habits
Release content regularly

I'd say I did pretty well on goal #1. I'm still far from a great frontend developer but I'm much better than I was at the beginning of the year. For building personal habits, I only accomplished half of these. I got my driver's license and took better care of my health but I still need to get a better sleep schedule, get in shape, and be a better cook. As far as releasing content, I also partially did this. I released a total of 4 blog posts and 6 twitter videos over the whole year when my goal was 24 blog posts and 24 videos. A little underwhelming.

Overall, I'd say I accomplished nearly half of these goals. The rest of them I'm going to carry over to 2023.

Goals for 2023

I have 5 goals for 2023:

1. Spend 15h/week coding side projects

I learned the most building coding projects in 2022, whether that was at work or in my free time. In 2023, I'm committing to spending 15h a week outside of work coding. I'm privelaged to be in a position in my life right now where I'm single, still living at home, and don't have too many other obligations. I want to take advantage of this time to build as much as possible.

I'm going to push for coding projects at work and at the same time, build some impressive side projects. I built a bunch of web apps in 2022 but they were smaller. The motto for 2023 is going to be fewer but more impressive projects.

2. Go to the gym 4x/week and lose 20 pounds

I gained 15 pounds in 2022 that I want to lose plus gain some muscle. This is probably one of my top goals of 2023 – I want to take my execise and eating seriously. I'm going to go to the gym 4x a week and eat healthy.

3. Publish 2 videos and 1 blog post per month

This goal revolves around content. This goes back to learning in public; something I love to do but haven't done enough of this year. I want to focus on systems over goals, meaning I want to build a great system that enables me to release high quality content consistently as opposed to shooting for a specific number so this is just a baseline for now. These will likely be short two minute videos that I'll post to Twitter and one blog post that I'll be posting here on my blog.

The issue with this goal is it takes away time I could be coding, but I think two short videos and 1 blog post a month is low enough that it shouldn't impact my time too much.

4. Better personal habits

Pretty self explanatory but I want to build better personal habits for my life. I want to get disciplined with my sleep schedule, cook most of my meals, and accomplish some religious goals too.

I've noticed that having an erratic sleep schedule like I do now makes it where I'll be extremely productive one day, but won't do much work the next. My mood is also all over the place when I don't have a consistent sleep schedule.

For meals, I've been eating a lot of delivered food as well as some home cooked meals thanks to my wonderful mom). I want to learn how to cook for myself.

5. Spend more time with family and friends

This is one I want to prioritize because at the end of the day, it's all about the people in your life. I'm going to make a more concious effort to spend more time with family and friends this year.

Conclusion

And that's a wrap. For those of you that made it this far, thanks so much for reading. To follow along while I document my journey and learnings, follow me on Twitter. And if you have any questions or comments for me, my DMs are wide open!

I'm looking forward to an excellent 2023. Hope you all have a great year as well!