As 2019 was the first year I've ever written down any resolutions, it would be prudent to review how I did. Some of these resolutions didn't come with a measurable goal. So I'll summarize how I did in that area over the course of the year.

💏 marriage

Early on in the year I established a habit where I would give my wife compliments at the end of the day. I'd tell her what she did that made me proud of her, what she did that made me happy, or how I felt about her. I didn't have a perfect track record with this habit. But I found that I was much more open in telling Gaby how I felt about her. This led to her feeling more loved by me.

🏋🏼 fitness

I was lucky enough to travel to Mexico twice in 2019 (Cancun and Isla Mujeres). I worked hard in the gym to prepare for the beach and bathing suits. Shortly after the second trip in September, I began to burn out of my healthy routines. I started to be more flexible with my diet. I took a break from the gym in December, but I'm already back at it in 2020. I'd say it was a balanced year for my fitness, and I was very happy with my physique in the summer!

👨🏼‍💻 career

I spent most of the past decade working at Dell, but 2019 brought big changes in my career. I finally made the jump to web development at Adobe! This career shift has reinvigorated me, and I love my new team and company.

💻 coding

I bit off more than I could chew here, but that doesn't mean I didn't make progress. I accomplished a lot and upgraded my skills throughout 2019.

learning

I completed Advanced React by Wes Bos, which was absolutely huge. I also finished a ton of Level Up Tutorials courses by Scott Tolinski. I definitely accomplished my resolution to become more comfortable in GraphQL and styled-components.

My work at Adobe gave me more experience with Docker, Jest, Jenkins pipelines, Amazon Web Services, and Chrome extensions. This breadth of build, test, and deployment technologies helped me become a more well rounded developer. And as icing on the cake, I also attended Artifact Conf here in Austin, which was my first conference.

My last goal was to learn how to make an authenticated, multi-user application. I attempted this with giftex, but fell short after having difficulty integrating Firebase with Next.js.

freelancing

The Iron Jimmy project definitely exposed some growing pains in my freelancing career. After that experience, I did not pursue any other clients. While I'm not counting it out for the future, right now I'm happy building things for myself.

open source

My goal was to contribute to three other open source repositories. I crushed that number with 13 pull requests, 11 of which got merged!

🌱 marketing

My YouTube channel has grown significantly over the year. I'm at almost 100 subscribers thanks to my coding livestreams. Twitter has been my prominent platform this past year. It allows me to interact directly with the web development community. My Instagram has gained a few followers here and there. I'm definitely putting more work into showing a developer/fitness lifestyle. And Facebook? The platform is pretty much useless to me now that I'm no longer pursuing freelance clients.

📝 blogging

I did a great job posting once per month (and twice in April!) for a while, but by the time summer hit I fell off the wagon. I still believe blogging is very valuable, but I find it much easier to produce content via YouTube livestreams and Twitter.

What's your opinion, where would you prefer to hear from me? Let me know!