It’s January and that means…goal setting time!! After the Christmas break I was able to chill out and forget about my career and coding but now it’s time to put my life back into gear and come up with some goals and objectives for the year ahead. This is a great way to get focused and get :shit: done. Ok so without further ado, here are my goals for 2018:

  1. Set goals…(wow! that was easy, one off the list so far :sunglasses:).
  2. Complete a goal…(yes!! two goals down).
  3. Contribute to open source software.
  4. Create an iOS app that people will use.
  5. Improve my public speaking.

OK, so the remaining goals are a bit vague. Lets go into some detail and make them SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timed. I am going to concentrate on the S,M and T.

Contribute to open source.

So I’ve been using swift a lot recently and I really like the language. It’s also open source, so it seems like a no brainer to help towards it in some way. So here is my plan to contribute to the swift language.

Specific

Learn the ins and outs of the language. Have a pull request merged from a bug fix/improvement in the language.

Measured

Accepted pull request, failing that at least submit a pull request.

Timed

Download and debug the language by the end of February. Submit a pull request by the end of April. Have a pull request accepted by the end of May.

I realize I may not have a pull request accepted at all but its good to aim for this and if I fall short, so what, at least I’ll have learned a lot.

Create an app that people will use.

I’ve wrote a couple of apps before and published them to the app store e.g Yes/No but they were pretty crap and got zero downloads. That’s OK though, my plan was not to have a million downloads, my goal was to start an app and finish it and then publish it. I learned a huge amount in the process. Now I want to create an app which people will actually use and that will help people in their daily lives. OK well lets make this goal SMART or SMT.

Specific

My idea for an app is one that will help in managing my thyroid medication. I take a tablet everyday because I have hypothyroidism and I think an app which will allow me to record when I have taken the medication and let me know if I have missed a day would be pretty cool. It might help other people with the same condition.

Measured

I have submitted the app to the app store and it gets 10 downloads.

Timed

I want to have the core functionality completed by July and the app submitted by September. 10 downloads by December.

Improve my public speaking.

I want to improve my public speaking ability. The way to do this is to practice, as public speaking is a skill. I’m going to aim for speaking at a meetup and maybe my goal for contributing to open source will help here. I could share my experience with working on open source with swift in a swift meetup here in Dublin.

Specific

Discuss my open source experience in a swift meetup in Dublin. Talk about how I got involved with the community, what I learned and the problem I was able to fix.

Measured

I will have presented at a swift meetup.

Timed

Have it done by September.

So there we have it some goals for this year. Will I complete them?…hopefully but if I don’t at least I can reflect on the year and see what went wrong. It will help me to adjust my goals going forward :wink: