Welcome to 2019 ya'll! Another year means another set of goals to focus on. While I don't advise setting specific goals for a year out, I do suggest picking some areas in life to improve upon over the course of the year. Here are mine.

💏 marriage

No matter how hectic life gets with our two kids, I want to ensure my wife knows how much I love and appreciate her. I'd like to focus on expressing that more clearly. So my goal is to make a comment that reminds her of how I feel daily.

🏋🏼 fitness

After having our second child, working out and proper nutrition took a backseat. But now that the kids have a nice schedule, it's time to get back on board. My goal is to workout five days a week in our home gym, and meal prep weekly.

👨🏼‍💻 career

As you've seen from some of my past posts, I've been interviewing with HomeAway. No matter what happens with them, I want to spend this year aligning my career with my interests in web development, both front and back end.

💻 coding

There's a lot I want to learn and build this year to grow my coding skills, so I'll break this down into three sections.

learning

I recently purchased Advanced React by Wes Bos. I started working my way through the course and plan to finish it this year. My goal is to become comfortable working with GraphQL and styled-components. Additionally, I want to gain the skills required to make multi-user applications, with proper authentication.

freelancing

I'm currently working on a marketing and ecommerce website for Iron Jimmy, a barbell sleeve company. It's my first real paid freelancing job! My goal is to gain one more paid client by the end of of the year.

open source

I recently contributed to open source and it felt great knowing that my changes, however small, have an impact on project such as styled-components. I want to keep that trend going with at least three other contributions throughout the year.

🌱 marketing

My primary social media platform is Twitter, where I tweet mostly about coding. I want to grow my social media presence on Instagram and Facebook to help market myself as a web developer and gain new clients. I haven't yet set any concrete goals in this area, but it's something I want to get better at.

📝 blogging

This blog is my home on the web, it's my best opportunity to show others who I am and what I can do. I want to continue writing posts, with a goal of one per month. I also want to improve the website by expanding it to more than just a blog. My goal is to close all of these issues during the year.