In an effort to keep up a good habit, it’s time to do a lit­tle reflec­tion on last year, and set new goals for 2015. I can’t believe how quick­ly 2014 went by. I feel as if every year seems to go by quick­er than the last. Still, I was able to accom­plish three out of five goals this past year, which I’m quite proud of.

Here were my goals for 2014:

1. Lose Weight
2. Learn Rails
3. Col­lab­o­rate with Friends
4. Men­tor a Student
5. Take Work-cations

I did real­ly well! I lost 10 lbs in 2014 and man­aged to keep them off. This is still an area I need to work on and will be putting more effort into this year.

2014 was the year I built the CMS pow­er­ing Good­stuff. Togeth­er with Will Duffy, we built this awe­some sys­tem that makes cre­at­ing new shows and post­ing episodes a breeze. With Will’s help, I’ve become more com­pe­tent with Rails. I can han­dle my own when it comes to gen­er­at­ing new migra­tions, cre­at­ing new con­trollers, and I even learned how to inte­grate Stripe pay­ments into a Rails app!

Last year, I com­plained that if I could work from any­where, why was­n’t I? This was fixed by fly­ing to Guatemala and stay­ing a total of six weeks! It was an absolute blast, I rode the bus every­where, got to see old friends and make new ones, went 5 days with­out water, and even spent 3 days on the beach. I did all of it, quite cheap­ly. I’d def­i­nite­ly rec­om­mend it.

What do I want to accom­plish in 2015? Here are my goals for this year:

1. Lose Weight
   This stu­pid goal is on the list every year. But slow­ly, I’m mak­ing progress, and it needs to con­tin­ue. I signed up for the gym in Jan­u­ary, and thanks to my love­ly fianceé, we’ve been going regularly.
2. Learn a Javascript Frame­work
   I’d like to even­tu­al­ly become a design­er who’s also a full-stack devel­op­er, and this is what I see as the next step in my devel­op­ment knowl­edge. There’s a lot of talk about Angu­lar, Back­bone, Ember, etc., and I’d like to know what’s going on here. I’ve heard you can cre­ate some real­ly awe­some appli­ca­tions with these, which is where I see my career head­ing as a whole.
3. Sell More CMS Licens­es
   Last year, I built a pod­cast­ing CMS. I also licensed it to three net­works: the one I co-found­ed, Good­stuff FM, Relay FM, and Bro­ken Bug­gy. I’d like to license this CMS to more net­works who are in need of a pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple sys­tem to man­age their shows. This might involve cre­at­ing some type of mar­ket­ing site, but also might mean that I devel­op this into a SaaS.
4. Bet­ter Sleep­ing Habits
   Sleep is so impor­tant. They say that when you miss out on sleep, you don’t ever recu­per­ate it. That’s depress­ing. Either way, I’ve got to get bet­ter about get­ting to sleep ear­li­er and wak­ing up ear­li­er. It’s not so dif­fi­cult, and inter­est­ing­ly, I always feel refreshed when I do.
5. Design and Build a Piece of Fur­ni­ture
   When I was lit­tle, I’d work with my Dad build­ing fur­ni­ture for our house. My Dad has always inter­est­ed in car­pen­try. We built my desk togeth­er, my bed, their bed, and many oth­ers. This year, I’d like to design and build some­thing for my home. Admit­ting­ly, I’ll most like­ly need his help, but for once, maybe I can retain some of the knowl­edge he imparts.

Those are my goals for this year. What are yours?