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Here we go, after my personal Dev Retro , I couldn't miss this chance to write about my personal Dev Prospective!!
It's the moment to look into the future and define clearly some goals that I want to achieve during this new year. Why I'm doing something like this? well , having a plan to achieve goals is very important, writing it and sharing with hundred of peoples motivate me to work in order to achieve them. In this list I will include both professional and non-professional goals.
Below you can find some deep quote strangely enough not from some guy who says that you can become rich simply by buying some of his courses that shows you how to invest in crypto.
My 2022 goals
At the beginning of 2022 I've pointed out this as my goals for the year:
[x] 🚬 Stop smoking
[ ] 📕 Learn more about Node Js + TS
[ ] 🚀 Learn Laravel or Symfony
[ ] 🐰 Learn Redis and RabbitMQ
[ ] 🏋️♀️ Lose at least 10kg
[x] 🧑🏼💻 Improve my knowledge about design patterns
[x] 🛩 Do at least 1 week of smartworking
[x] 📆 Join at conferences and meetups
But my life changed a lot after I wrote this, so this list has become more or less useless, even if I've achieved anyway a lot of this goals.
Like you can see many of this was goals tech-related, but since I've moved out from PHP and I needed to learn a new entire way of working (not only the programming language) I've decided on focus my studies on this, even if in the future I would like anyway to learn more about Redis and RabbitMQ. In some tasks I've outperformed like for example the one about smartworking, thanks to my job hop I've had the opportunity to travel a lot while working.
Professional goals
1. Improve as a Backend Software engineer ⚙️⚙️
It's been almost 8 months since I've became a BE Software Engineer , before I was a full stack for more than 3 years (in PHP :D), that's the reason why I think that during this year I should invest some resources to improve on this , learning new things like event driven programming, best practices for microservices communitcation and many other interesting topics (any suggestion about what study is welcomed in the comments).
I've also obtained during Black Friday the entire Rock the JVM's catalog, so my main focus during this year will be surely improving my knowledge about Scala and it's ecosystem (mainly the typelevel stack). I would like to dig deeper in how Scala works and improve my functional programming skills.
During the 2022 I found out surprisingly that I've adapted very well to the change from monolitic PHP to microservice architecture with Scala , so I'm quite confident that in 2023 I can reach an even higher level which can be considered "almost senior", obviously with the right effort.
2. Attend to more meetups and conferences 💥
In 2023 other than the Codemotion, I would like to increase my attendance at events like meetups, conferences and hackatons. During this two years which I started to attend some events I really grew thanks to them so I really think that they add a lot of value in my carreer and helps me to see a lot of different points of view that helps me as a person to think and improve my judgement about the discussed topics. Just hearing someone's story allows me to think about things I would never have thought of otherwise. I've explained my opinion about conferences here talking about the Function Scala conference in London and here talking about the Codemotion , the biggest developers conference in Italy.
3. Work on my side projects 🧠
During the 2022 , I have created the foundations for working on some fantastic new projects that I have been analysing for a long time and, after proper market and competitor analysis , I think I have the necessary know-how to start developing them. Currently I can't say much about this projects , but I really hope that me and the guys which decided to help, can enjoy the trip and can obtain our goals! Optimistically, by March there should be news on at least one of them, so stay tuned if you're curious!
I'm really working to create something that I can call my own, so I'm sure that during this 2023 I'll have a lot of news to share about this projects, I can spoiler that one of them is related to the dev's world!
4. Try the speaker's life 🙊
This is for sure the hardest one for me , since the first time I went to a talk I always wanted to try to be a speaker , I've always admired them for their capacity to present even difficult concepts or ideas to hundred of peoples.
So I really would like to try with simple talks and see how people react to them but, more importantly, how I react. I'm not really used to public speaking and to be completely honest, I'm sure I would feel very anxious about it , even if probably this feeling is something that every speaker has and with time and experience it will fade away little by little. I think that even if I won't be successfull I can learn a lot from this kind of experience (like when I tried to do some streams's on Twich).
Personal Goals
1. Finally after years I'll go to Japan 😍😍
We're almost there! after years of waiting due to COVID-19 (I was supposed to go in March 2020), finally it seems that I'll be able to go to visit for 16 days Japan!
I'll be able to visit a lot of different cities, and see a lot of different things, not only Tokyo!! the image that you see below is the itinerary that we're supposed to do during this 16 days in Japan. It was one of my biggest dreams since I was in middle school so this is a big milestone in my life.
2. Improve my concentration and my organisation 🧘
During the 2022 I think one of the things I've lacked more was concentration, I think that too many times I've missed the right amount of concentration, most of the times due to my social's dependency. In 2023 if I want to improve further I need to fight against it and obtain a new level of concentration.
On the organisation side I'm already working on it, during the end of 2022 I've improved quite a bit, my main tool here is simply a good organized google calendar. I put every damned thing in that calendar to schedule it (also wash and clean my cat's toilette).
At the beginning of the 2022 I was struggling also to go 3 times per week in gym , now I'm successfully going 3/4 times , so for me it's already an absolute win. Also, another little trick that I'm using to convince myself to do something is to announce to someone that today I'll do this specific "task", for example: if I need to go to the gym, I'll tell my parent that I will go to the gym and don't wait for me to eat dinner. This unconsciously helps me to act and go to the fucking gym.
3. Leave my parents house and live by myself 🏠
This is still a thought of mine so it's not set in the stone , but since I'm now 23 years old, I'm considering the option of finding an house near where my parents and friends lives and start my independent life. I think that I'll start with a simple rent , given that I'm still not sure that I want to remain in Italy and so buying an house could be too much. I'm also considering moving out only for 3 months and going to some EU cities (for now I was thinking about Barcellona , Lisbon or Valencia but every suggestion is welcomed), or even better 1 month per city but this could be very expensive and problematic.
4. Travel, travel and travel 🛫
POV: You have a seat by the porthole
This on my personal goals's list is a must , during the 2022 I had the chance to travel a lot, and so I want to travel in a lot of different places, below you can find some of them are (except the Japan which is already confirmed and booked) :
Warsaw
Valencia
Barcellona
Budapest
If you have any suggestion about which I should visit you can reach me out in the comment or on Linkedin
5. Starting to create my own investment portfolio
Disclaimer: I am anything but a financial advisor, don't even try to take one character of what I say for granted!!!
This year I'll try to save extra money to create my own investment portfolio on Degiro! I currently have another portfolio with Moneyfarm , which is all managed by our investor consultants.
Since I really think that finance is a subject in which everyone needs to have at least a bit of knowledge , so for this reason this year I want to try to create my own portfolio to gain some experience and knowledge, initially I'll deposit 100/150 EUR per month and experiment with a simple strategy. I'll probably start with some World ETFs (more specifically the Vanguard LifeStrategy 80/20 where 80 is the percentage of shares and 20 is the percentage of bonds ). To be honest initially I was wondering if create my portfolio with Scalable Capital because of their really good commissions, but after the third time that I've tried to verify my personal infos and the website didn't worked I left and signed up with Degiro. If you have any resource about investing, especially in ETFs , write me in the comments please!
Conclusions
So this is the big list of my objectives in 2023 , what do you think? too ambitious? well, they're goals after all 🤣🤣.
What are your goals for this year? please share them if you want in the comments or also drop me a line on Linkedin, I'll gladly read them to share opinions !!
