Goodbye 2016

We are wrapping up 2016. As it comes to a close, I'd like to take a look back at the year and plan for a new year resolution. On February 28, I started the RewardApp as I am calling it. I still don't have a name for it, and it is still not yet ready for a Beta release. It's not a terribly complicated app, so why has it taken so long to complete?

You can clearly see several places where I went weeks without updating the code. It seems to me that it coordinates well with the deadlines and stress levels I had throughout the year at my full-time job. When I feel stressed, I often times just want to sit down after work and stare at mindless television. So how can I better myself in 2017 to complete these side projects of mine?

The Simple Productivity Resolution

I have a resolution this year; every single work day, I plan to work just 15 minutes on something. I'm giving myself the weekends off, unless I am just motivated to get in some extra work. This 15 minutes could be first thing in the morning, during lunch, maybe during a mid-afternoon break. I think just trying to do something, anything, will help. It might not even be coding. This could be as simple as testing the app and logging ideas or bugs into GitHub.

My other resolution this coming year is this site itself. It has always just been a placeholder on the internet with my name and info, and not much more. I've started learning WordPress development, and plan to continue my education. I'm going to start pushing myself to start blogging about the issues that I run into and how I resolve them. I also want to start some coding tutorials on all kinds of things that I like to code. Maybe it will help somebody someday.

The Future of Angular

2016 was a big year for Javascript. The official release of Angular2 was a big thing to take note of. My first look into Angular2 was attending a workshop by John Papa at Dev Intersection in Orlando. I really enjoyed the talk and started playing with Angular2 immediately in my hotel room. However, I quickly lost interest as during this time there were still a lot of issues and things were changing constantly. Now that we are in a steady release life-cycle, I plan to revisit it and put up some tutorials.

I also attended a workshop on NativeScript, which is a really cool tool that allows you to create native applications by compiling javascript code into native Android and iOS code.