This has been quite the year, in terms of milestones and the stage of life I am currently at.
To date, I have:
- Spent my first full year working at a software company
- Have garnered a great deal of skill as a software engineer, including continuing mastery of Python, JavaScript, and mongoDB, as well as scheduling and estimating features, UI/UX design, devops, research engineering and data science, and problem scoping and optimization knowledge
- Spent my first full year living apart from both home and school (super scary at first, later on not as scary)
- Generated my first $30,000 in savings
- Read 36 books, not including ebooks or research papers, with plans to read many more
- Finished 7 Udemy online courses, and working on an eighth at the time of writing, which has provided me with skills in Ruby on Rails, React and React Native, e-commerce on Shopify, and Django REST Framework
- Started my personal website and began regularly publishing on my blog
- Learned how to make friends in real life and develop a more confident personality
It’s not a bad start. Even though I don’t feel it right now, I know it is indeed leagues ahead of where I was a year ago. Working at the company I’m working at right now has probably been the biggest confidence booster and the best learning experience I have had so far (due to both the good and the bad things).
This was at the Capital One Hackathon on November 4th to 5th; I’m holding the pink laptop. I didn’t know the photographer was taking the picture, but I thought it made me look nice and would be a good way to remember the year 😅
There are plenty of things I want to do in the New Year, though. I will detail them in a post tomorrow as my New Year’s Resolutions 😄
(Addition on 2017/12/31): In the picture, my hackathon teammates Dwipam Katariya and Yuan Chen are to my right (I’m showing something to them).