My goals for 2023

2022 was a great year for me. I got married, purchased my dream car, had some amazing vacations and experiences, and somehow ended up with a fourth cat. Carrying that momentum into 2023, I’m shifting my goals and priorities onto myself and my professional life. Some of these goals are things I started last year, but couldn’t dedicate enough time to. My goal for this year is buckle down and start making meaningful growth in these areas.

Without further ado, and in no particular order, here are my goals for 2023.

Improving brockherion.dev

I created this blog in October of 2021 and since then, I’ve seen tremendous growth. I went from averaging 50-100 views a month to over 2,000. For that, I want to say thank you for your support. It truly means a lot to me and keeps me motived to keep writing content.

With that in mind, I’m getting serious about creating more and higher quality content. My goal currently is to publish one article a week and continue making small site improvements where need be so you can have the best experience possible. I’m going to focus my content on full-stack web development with React and TypeScript. I also plan on writing articles about things I’m learning and working on.

My other goal for brockherion.dev this year is to streamline writing articles. I’m currently using Astro and markdown to write articles, but I’m hitting a point where a CMS might be helpful. I would love to be able to get content out faster and not have mess with merging files, compressing/optimizing images, and waiting for deployments to publish articles. I’m not sure if I want to use a pre-built solution or create my own just yet, but in either case it would help streamline the process. I’ve already started using tools like Airtable to help me with organizing and managing ideas.

Publish (at least) three side projects

This is something I tried last year with Chirpmark, but never fully executed. There’s a number of reasons for that and I learned a lot from the experience. I’ll write a blog post explaining what went wrong with that and what I learned, so stay tuned for that.

I want to take those learnings and apply them to other projects that I’m passionate about. I’m currently working a website called imadedis.dev, a site for sharing your side projects. My goal with this project is to make it easier for developers to share what they’re working on with other people. My thought with this project was that if I’m focusing on building side projects this year, why not have a central place where I can share them?

Other ideas I have are a custom CMS to streamline my blogging workflow, like I mentioned earlier, as well as some apps around the sport of gymnastics. I’m currently helping coach at my former high school and already see areas where technology can be used to make various aspects of the sport easier for athletes, coaches, and officials.

I will also be building these in public, so you can follow my journey from app creation to hitting production.

Getting Brock’s Bytes back up and running

Brock’s Bytes was a newsletter I was running for some time, but never quite found a stride with. It didn’t have a clear focus or vision, and I would find it frustrating to sit and write without a goal. I figured with Twitter killing Revue that this would be a good time to revisit and refine what Brock’s Bytes is.

I moved off Revue and over to ConvertKit for managing my newsletter content. I’ve also narrowed the scope of it. Instead of being eight random things from the week, I’ll be sharing eight things related to software development. This can be anything from book suggestions to library recommendations to productivity advice. This should make each issue more focused and more valuable to readers. My goal is to grow my subscriber list to 100 readers by the end of the year.

You can sign-up using the form at the bottom of this article. I hope to see you there!

Focusing on my physical and mental health

Taking care of myself is not something I had really focused on until recently. I’m somebody who just pushes and pushes until I burn out. I want to stop that cycle. By developing healthy habits around my physical and mental health, I can reduce the chances I burn out and improve my overall well being for now and the future.

Last year I started working out and going to therapy. In terms of physical health, I’ve been hitting the gym regularly and eating better than I was last year. This, so far, has lead to a noticeable difference in my physique and energy levels. Therapy has been great for my mental health because it’s a safe place for me express myself and get advice and just talk through issues without fear of being judged. Even if you’re not dealing with anything major, I believe that therapy is a great thing and has been tremendously helpful to me.

I also am pursuing more of my interests outside of programming, like reading, building LEGOs, tinkering with PC’s, and more. I believe it’s important to have a variety of things you’re passionate about and interested in. This year I’ve started reading A Song of Ice and Fire (finally) and finished a few awesome self-help books. I also got my hand the UCS LEGO Star Wars Republic Gunship and had a blast putting that together. Having these interests is another great thing for my mental health and helps me become more of a well-rounded individual.

Growing my social media presence

I’ve been on Twitter for awhile now, as well as Instagram and TikTok, but haven’t really created much engaging content recently. I plan on using Twitter to compose short-form content and interact with a larger community. For Instagram and TikTok, I’ll be making short videos showing more day-in-the-life type things, as well as videos where I talk about tech things.

One other thing happening this year is I will be creating a Discord server. This server will let me interact directly with you and the rest of the community. The vision I have for it is a space where people can come hang out, ask programming questions, share what they’re building, and meet other like minded people with a passion for technology.

Conclusion

These are my goals for 2023. With these, I’m aiming to grow as a developer, content creator, and person. This year is the year where I buckle down start making things happen. A lot of these are things I started doing last year, but without a set goal in mind. This approach hasn’t lead to any meaningful growth and I aim to change that.

Thanks for reading and I’ll catch you in the next one!