2018 is coming to an end. I thought just like last year, this would be a good time to do a wrap up post for the end of the year.

I launched this site in October 2017. 2018 was the first full year that this site has been online. It's become a truly personal site that I use for a lot of different purposes. Even if I'm not writing posts, having a single site with all my contact information I think has a lot of benefits to it. It also has a lot more components like pages dedicated to my open source work, about me, etc. Although my last post was over 2 months ago, I still see the value of this site and look forward to continuing it into 2019.

Speaking of not posting as often. It is a goal of mine to work on posting more articles in 2019. I'm honestly not sure if I will achieve that. There are a lot of reasons why I doubt I will achieve that goal. Time being the biggest reason. I have much higher priorities in terms of projects I want to focus my time on. I also see a lot of great articles out there relating to programming, and lately I don't feel like I have any great concepts or things to the amazing articles that are already being written in the technology space. Which might mean it's time to branch out and start writing about other things. We will see how that works out in 2019. Let's just say, I have the goal of writing one massive post like my Node.js AWS Deployment tutorial I wrote in 2018. That was one of my favorite posts of the year that I did. Partly because I enjoyed it so much and I think it was some of the best work I've done on this site.

By far the biggest highlight of 2018 was going to my first WWDC in June. WWDC was a conference I had wanted to go to for years and years. This year the stars aligned and it actually happened. I'm still shocked to this day that I loved it as much as I did. I knew it was going to be fun and I was so excited about it going into it, but never in my wildest dreams did I expect it to be as fun and amazing as it was. Now from the outside looking in, WWDC 2018 was kinda lackluster. Apple didn't have as many big announcements. Obviously it was their off year before 2019. But just being able to go to WWDC was a truly amazing experience.

I see the beginning of 2019 being a time to finish up some massive projects I've been working on for a very long time. I'm really hoping to get those complete and shipped as soon as possible. After that I think it'll be time to go back to the basics and get back to working on some foundational things. I do have a goal in 2019 to find some more things that I enjoy doing with my time. I see that being a huge focus of mine in the later parts of 2019 especially. I also want to spend some time perfecting certain things. Going back and rewriting my about me page, ensuring my LinkedIn page is updated, etc.

Speaking of perfecting things, I have a goal in 2019 to make improvements to this site. I'd love to be able to add a search functionality, better sorting of posts, seek to date functionality, and more. I think Ghost is a really amazing platform, but it's sometimes slightly difficult to take advantage of that power. Maybe this includes building a custom theme and doing a massive redesign of this site. We will see how all of that works out in 2019.

I think that wraps up everything I have to say for now. Here is to 2019 being a great year!