I’m so pumped about 2016.
So. Pumped.
I’m coming into this year with a super positive headspace.
Loving where I’m at. Loving where I’m headed. Knowing what I’m about.
That is a rare headspace for me! And potentially fleeting..
But most of all I’m loving my current vision for all the things I want to set my hand to this year.
It’s compelling (for me, anyway!).
flickr photo shared by Austin Kleon under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license
Compelling 2016: Learn. Teach. Wonder. Share.
I ran a number of Git courses in Australia last year - and I’ve totally loved it. The students were engaged; I loved working with developers; I even loved developing the courseware!
But the most awesome payoff is end of day: When I watch them do hardcore things with Git that they only dreamed about at the start of the day. When they grok the DAG deeply. When they can rebase, merge, reset, and deconflict without any magic, or any fear.
That. Is. Awesome.
This year I’m going to invest heavily in courseware, teaching, user groups, conferences, YouTube, Pluralsight and other cool teching opportunities that come up.
Don’t care about monetising - just care about making a dent in leveling up devs.
Can’t wait.
Compelling 2016: Love the web. And JavaScript.
I’ve blogged before about how 2015 Code Conference re-ingnited my love for the web. And it hasn’t gone away.
I’m more excited about the potential of the web than ever.
I’ve just finished a prototype spike building a mobile app with Ionic. That is some serious way-cool tech. Check out some basic progress syncing the Google Tasks API with a local IndexedDb (via Dexie.js) running in the browser.
I’ve been doing lots of JavaScript in the last season, and that’s only going to amp up next year with the new version of Angular coming out. And with plenty more experimenting with Ionic, Cordova, React, WinJS and other webby mobile goodness.
And don’t forget a bunch more game-making fun with Phaser.
flickr photo shared by JeepersMedia under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
Compelling 2016: Loving the cloud. Loving the Mobile. With a MS focus.
I love what Microsoft are doing with Azure. It’s absolutely amazing. In fact, I love where Microsoft is heading generally: Cloud first, Mobile first, Open APIs.
Last year I really started to get into Azure. I wrote Node apps on their PAAS, sparked up VMs to test things on, used some of their scheduled service stuff, even tinked with their TFS Team Services stuff.
And enjoyed it all.
This year, I’d been keen to get on top of their mobile solutions offering (particularly their notifications APIs stuff) and some of their other super useful messaging products. Lots to leverage there!
flickr photo shared by Austin Kleon under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-ND ) license
Compelling 2016 : Show Your work.
Last last year I read Austin Kleon’s great little book Show Your Work. Great book.
And this year I’m totally inspired to share more of the stuff I’m working on.
I’ve done very little open source work in the last year. Mostly I’ve been fully engaged with doing onsite consulting work that doesn’t really afford me the luxury of sharing things with the web.
But 2016 is totally different.
It started late last year, when I released an open source Glen’s Invaders game just to get back on the open source horse.
This year, I’m also really committed to doing more User Group stuff. I’ve missed it, and I’ve already started brainstorming a dozen (!) talks I’m keen to give over the next year.
And the blog.
Well, moving to Hexo has been fantastic and really made blogging fun again. In the spirit of John Sonmez’s Being Prolific, I’m really going to try and blog 50 times this year. That’s a stretch goal!
We’ll see…
flickr photo shared by RaeAllen under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
Compelling 2016: Ditching the Golden Handcuffs
There’s lots to love about enterprise consulting. It pays really well. You get to work with smart enterprise devs. Doing the Scrum thing hard.
But there are serious “golden handcuff” issues: where won’t leave your well-paying “sure thing” gig to get out there and actually live what’s inside you.
So this year, as my wife heads back to full time work, I’m dialing back the consulting story and dialing up the Bytecode training story: making a dent by leveling up busy devs.
One of my inspirations this year is guitarist Joe Bonamassa. I so resonated with when his manager, Roy Weisman, was talking about their journey.
It was never about the money. It was about doing what we wanted.
Amen. At so many levels, Amen.
Let’s rock 2016!
Let’s make a dent.
Looking forward to sharing the journey…
flickr photo shared by Alberto Cabello Mayero under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license