Programming Resolutions — 10 Engineering Goals for 2017
As the year winds down, people everywhere are setting goals and resolutions. It’s a very exciting time, the upcoming year is full of hope and promise… or at least until resolutions start to break.
My favorite resolution it “going to the gym” or “getting into shape”. It was always interesting to endure gym in January and its subsequent fall off February.
Even still, goals and resolutions are important. Even if statistically you will most likely fail, setting goals and aspiring for something is an important practice.
With that said, in no particular order here are my ten engineering centric goals for 2017.
10. Learn Scala
This was kind of a hard one to narrow down. I was actually deciding between Scala, Haskell, and Go. I think the fact I was considering Haskell makes Scala a better choice. Although all three of them would be great.
9. Learn Java
At this point, I feel Java is one area I’d like to up my game in. One of the reasons I initially picked Javascript over Ruby was because I felt Ruby abstracted certain operations whereas Javascript forced you to build your own understanding on how to achieve them. I’m probably totally wrong, but that was just an initial assessment.
I mention that to reinforce the fact I like to understand the inner pinnings of how things work, and I feel like doing a dive in Java will help with that.
8. Learn Ruby (maybe Python)
Even with Node.js being pretty active and growing, I feel it’s unclear how large Node will be in the long run. This means to be more marketable as a back end engineer, a good understanding of Rails is probably going to be valuable. Along those lines, I’ve also seen a good number Django related job listings in my searches so far. Understanding Ruby & Python is not the main purpose here, but just being able to create a Rails or Django application.
7. Redux
This has been on the list for a while. Having done a number of React projects and touch upon Redux at a surface level, I would really like to build a Redux app from the ground up. This doesn’t necessarily bringing in everything on my own, but at least building from ground zero.
6. Create React App CLI and/or Ember CLI
Current I’m piecing together projects and folder structure on my own. I’m interested in digging into CLI’s where scaffolding and structure is pre defined. Ember seems to be one of the more defined ones out there, but with a general preference towards React it would be fun to dig into the React side of CLI’s.
5. Do Some Angular 2
Because ng2. Looking at 2017, the fight for mindshare will most likely be fought between Facebook’s React and Google’s Angular 2. Given I feel pretty comfortable with React, makes sense to take a look at Angular 2. On top of that, most of my React buddies have had pretty positive things to say about Angular 2 so I’m actually pretty excited.
4. Understand Elasticsearch
Honestly not sure why, just see the name come up a lot.
3. Observables
Because wow this is a game changer.
2. Learn Webpack
I classify Webpack in a similar category with Docker. While yes, I know they are used for totally different purposes on totally different aspects of the application build process, on the surface they both seem to solve a similar problem.
Specifically I was not a big fan of Docker before doing the Docker Deep Drive a few weeks back. That’s opened me more to trying out more similar items such as Webpack.
1. Build Stronger Computer Science Fundamentals
Because this is important.
I think there is a dichotomy between real world work and somewhat theoretical fundamentals like data structure and algorithms. They hands down work together and reinforce each other over time, but it wouldn’t say it’s a direct correlation.
Conclusion
So there it is, let’s see in 365 days how these goals hold up.
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