Reflections from 2021 & Goals for 2022
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The year of 2021 has been the biggest year of my career. It is sometimes difficult to talk about success when the entire world is struggling and you can really see your privilage showing. However, it is still important to talk about our wins and our losses and to be proud of what you have accomplished.
I set some lofty goals after watching Zero to Mastery's Future Proof Yourself Workshop early in 2021. My big goals were to start a business of my own and to make more money than I had in any previous career, I didn't care how I did it (freelancing, courses, new job), just that I got it done. Well, I am happy to say, not only did I do it, I blew it away. I did some freelance work early in the year, filed for my LLC, bDesignedDev in July, and at the time got my dream job at Grainger, building design systems with Svelte. I also did things I didn't even think were possible this year. I started co-hosting Purrfect.dev with Alex and got to talk to some incredible people and learned so much from this opportunity. It made me more comfortable speaking in public and helped me grow as a developer from the things I was learning about.
Communities
I dove hard into communities this year, especially my Twitter where I broke 1k followers and Discord communities like Party Corgi, Learn Build Teach, Svelte, our own Coding Cat discord, and recently found Frontend Horse and the new Jamstack community. This was honestly my key to success and staying sane in a year where it wasn't safe to go out and make friends. I found freelance clients, podcast guests, networked, got help, met many amazing people, worked on lots of open source, and have several places to chat with those I can call my friends. Communities are such a powerful thing in the dev world if you treat them right, participate, be kind, and help where you can.
Learn Build Teach
This philosophy from James Q. Quick that he doesn't want to take credit for and the name of the Discord Community he created, Learn Build Teach, is exactly how I got where I am today. This idea isn't new, in fact it pulls a lot from Learning in Public a blog post by Swyx. In essence, it just means that learning isn't the end of your journey, but the beginning. By building things out of what you've learned and then passing that knowledge on through teaching others, you end up learning more than you ever imagined. James had me on Learning Quick right after I got hired to talk about why I love Svelte so much and I talked about how this philosophy really helped put me where I am today.
Svelte Community
Of all the communities I am apart of, I feel like the Svelte community has really been the place I've come to love the most. I've had a love affair with Svelte since 2019, when Scott Tolinski talked about it on Syntax.fm. The people are friendly and helpful if you run into issues, but they are especially involved in improving and making the community better. We had Swyx on Purrfect.dev What's up with Svelte in April and after the podcast he mentioned this idea he had for a women's group in the Svelte community, Svete Sirens. He asked me if I would be interested in spearheading it and at the time, I turned him down. I thought I had too much going on and couldn't fit it into my busy schedule. Fast forward a few months and I asked him if anyone had taken him up on the offer. No one had, so I took the opportunity to say okay, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I can do this! I bought up SvelteSirens.dev and started rounding up people to help me. I found 3 co-founders and planned to do a monthly meetup/talk on the Svelte Society YouTube Channel. We quickly put things together and decided to officially announce the new community at Svelte Summit in the fall. Swyx had put together a watch party in New York and very last minute a lot of us decided to fly out. Rich Harris had just been hired by Vercel and Guillermo decided to fly out a few members of the team to join the watch party as well, including one of my co-founders, Steph Dietz. I flew in and out of New York in less than 24 hours, but this was the biggest opportunity I had all year. I met some of the most inspirational people to me, 2 of my co-founders of Svelte Sirens, and many of my other community friends. Hopefully this will pave the way for the future of the Svelte Sirens, we already have lots of things in the pipeline for 2022.
2022 Expectations
Of course I have to be optimistic and think that 2022 will be the best year for my career yet. I'm setting lots of goals already and really focusing on the shorter term goals this year as well as some bigger long term ones. I have the regular old ones like read more, lose weight, work on myself, be present, but hopefully by getting down to the details and setting really short term goals I will be able to achieve more than I ever have. For January, I am planning an Intro to Svelte couse on CodingCat.dev and to start out my goal of livestreaming every 2 weeks for the Svelte Sirens. My big goals for this year are to put out some kind of content every month on Coding Cat, including some paid courses, and to really focus on the Svelte Sirens community and making it a place that everyone wants to come and be apart of! I hope you all have a happy new year and truly have your best year yet!