Goals for 2021

I didn’t make any goals for 2020, or if I did, I didn’t officially announce them. 2020 has been a hard year for all of us, 2021 is going to be better.

Here are a few ideas for my goals for the year ahead.

1. Azure certification
2. Mentoring
3. F#
4. Cosmos db/Mongo db
5. Give a talk
6. Mandlebrot Generator
7. Pwned Pass Mobile App
8. More time for me

1. I want to get a certificate to show how much I know. The obvious area for this is Azure. I spend a lot of time playing with Azure, building and deploying to the platform I should be able to get certified in this area. I actually had an exam booked in 2020 but it was an in-person exam so was cancelled when Covid hit. I plan to sit the foundation exam in the first quarter of 2021 and I will take it from there.

2. I have had a few times recently where I have been reminded that I don’t have much experience working with others. Mostly because I work in a one-man development team so there are limited opportunities in the workplace. I have a few ideas to change this, but this is one of my top priorities for 2021.

3. & 4) My experience is very Microsoft and C# so I want to spend some time exploring and learning tech that is adjacent to this. A functional language like F# sounds like a good compliment to my existing skills and my data skills are also very SQL server so some document database skills would be a good place to spend some time.

4. Doing a talk has been on my list for years. I am terrified of doing one and with everything online now I don’t know if that makes things easier or harder. I don’t think 2021 is going to be the year for this but maybe I will take baby steps towards this goal.

5. Twitter recently reminded me about watching a Mandlebrot generate one pixel at a time in the 1980s. I would love to explore the code used to generate them and how fast they currently are to produce.

6. My Google play store Xamarin forms app that uses the HIBP API has less than 100 users and I am considering closing it down, especially as I pay a monthly fee for API keys. I haven’t really decided what to do, maybe I will spend some time improving it, maybe I will close it down, maybe I will build something else.

7. For many people 2020 has been a hard year, I am one of those