My Goals For 2024

I don't usually share my goals with the world, but since my website here is pretty small and it's all about me anyway, I figure why not go ahead and put out into the world some of the things that I want to achieve in 2024. I have two different sets of goals that I'll share in this article: 1. My fitness goals 2. Coding/professional related goals

Fitness

This year, I took running more seriously than in years past. In 2024 I will be running a full marathon in the year's second half. I want to continue my running journey and do some longer races. As of right now, I have signed up for another half marathon that will be taking place on March 30th. I enjoyed my journey this year training for a half marathon, and since that process ended in early November, I have missed the feeling of training for an event. I recently signed up for the Charlotte Craft Beer Half Marathon because 1. I like beer, and 2. I want to do more events before I run my first marathon. I need more running experience and to increase my weekly mileage before I'm ready to tackle the full marathon. I'm excited to continue my running journey into 2024. I'm still new to the running space, so I still have much to learn.

Coding and Professional Goals

This section itself is going to be split up into two different pieces. Since I have a software engineering job, I have some goals there that I want to address, and I have some personal goals as well.

Professionally

I've spent a year and a half with my current company (since June 2022), and this was my first job out of college. Since then, I've been on the team since I started. I've been doing Angular development and, more specifically, working on a component library. This has been an excellent opportunity to learn in-depth how Angular and the browser work. I've also been exposed to many different front-end topics on this team, which has been a great experience. In 2024, though, I would want to push for the opportunity to work on a team building a front-end application. I enjoy front-end development and getting the fine details right. In the long run, this will also be the best thing for me professionally, getting exposed to more front-end development. So, all I know isn't just component library development, as it is very specific.

Personally

My personal goals are not exhaustive; I will think of more things I want to work on in the coming year. Right now, I want to focus on building out this blog more. One of my other hobbies is photography; I would love to create a place where I can share my pictures that's not Instagram (gross). So, I want to determine the best way to display and manage my photos. I want to dive deeper into learning about **Astro**, too. It does many cool things, and I've only scratched the surface of what it can do. I'm enjoying web development, but outside of that realm, I want to learn some Rust in 2024. Maybe dip my toes into some WebAssembly, too. I don't know much about either of them, but I like the idea of WebAssembly, and I think it could be a valuable skill to have in the future.

Conclusion

These goals are subject to change, mainly my personal goals. But overall, I'm trying to be a more well-rounded developer in 2024 and continue on my running journey to see how far I can take it.