Hi everyone, 2020 has been a strange year for infinite reasons that no one could have ever imagined at its beginning. A global crisis of which perhaps we are only now able to see a way out and which has brought many people to their knees, which has made us lose loved ones and has often taken away hope.
But I want to try starting from all this to analyze goals I set myself at the beginning of this year (here the tweet that certifies it) and look back to understand what I have achieved and what I will strive to achieve next year.
I hope with this article to inspire some of my readers to make a similar list of what they aspire to achieve and guide them through 2021. Happy reading!
Publish a side projects app with at least 1000 downloads on the Play Store 😞
At the beginning of 2020, I had set myself this goal to transform some of my side projects into concrete projects that could be used by many people. Among all, I chose to release an App on the world of cryptocurrencies with my brother and a friend. We arrived at the testing phase on both Android and iOS with a dozen acquaintances and around September we were about to publish it when some Apple Store rules, related to our private account, halt the project. I tried to write to Apple Support to review their decision, I also changed some features, but for the moment I have not yet found a solution as I cannot change my account to a corporate one.
Publish my first book 🥳
In this case, I had set myself this goal to try a form of side income and I had chosen the publication of a book. I didn't have a clear idea of the book I wanted to publish but it would almost certainly have been computer-themed. In a sense, I have published a book but this has no real theme and some of you may argue that I cheated ... in a sense yes because the book I published is a coloring book for children: Super! Libro da Colorare. The reason why I chose to publish this book is that I have a 2-year-old daughter who really likes coloring and this was my contribution to her great passion done directly by me.
Run at least 500km 😞
This goal was what I believed in the most at the beginning of the year because by mid-2019 I had put myself at a good pace and had taken the pace to go out and run 3 times a week alternating between gym and road and in my plans reaching 500km was feasible. Everything went well until the beginning of March when I was above average, then Covid-19, restrictions on movement, and closure of gyms (which in Italy have practically never been opened again) made it impossible to achieve this goal.
Contrary to my previous goal, I didn't really believe in this, but I was serious about proposing to my boss the possibility of working from home a few days a week. In this case, Covid-19 accelerated and in a certain sense forced the transition to this mode of work which in the period from March to April led me to have my first real home-working experience. I felt much more productive and I could spend a lot more time with my family. In addition to this at the end of September, I changed job and a second wave of the epidemic for Covid-19 has led me from the end of October until today (and most likely also in the near future) to work entirely from home.
Improve my knowledge of Flutter 🥳
As the name of my blog also says I was kidnapped by Flutter and the possibility of developing cross-platform applications starting from a single code base, here some articles from my flutter-themed blog:
A goal I had set myself was to deepen my knowledge of Flutter and this year I have followed and completed two courses on Udemy: The Complete 2020 Flutter Development Bootcamp with Dart by Angela Yu and The Complete Dart Language Guide for Beginners and Beyond by Andrea Bizzotto, published my first package on pub.dev: fluentui_icons and created a repository: awesome-pubdev that collects the best pub packages that can be used in applications written in Flutter.
Publish at least 10 articles in English 🥳
I set myself this goal at the beginning of the year to improve my knowledge of English through writing, being a native Italian speaker I decided to study this language even better, and what a better way than by practicing writing texts in English. I often still use Google Translate to write some things better or to search for that word or phrase that I don't know how to say but I'm slowly improving.
The other reason that prompted me to give myself this goal is Hasnode itself; at the beginning of the year I wanted to focus a lot on this platform which I consider fantastic and I, therefore, combined the desire to grow my audience with that of deepening my knowledge of English. With this article, I got to 21!
Contribute to at least 3 repositories on Github 🥳
I really believe in open source, I have been a Linux user for almost 15 years, I code for work so what better goal than to help the community and other developers like me on the largest platform in the world for code development. This year I participated in some repositories here and there, with some pull requests, mainly on the documentation side and with the creation of public repositories managed by me. Considering that I had never used GitHub actively they can be quite satisfied, you can follow my progress here github/@polilluminato.
Final thoughts
All in all, this year has been positive for me, some things in which I believed a lot have not come true and others have been done much better than I hoped for. The goal of the list at the end is just to put down a series of objectives and do everything to achieve them. Some of these will not be achieved and others will be more than realized, others may change during construction but the most important thing is to set goals.
I am already preparing the list of goals for next year which will be a mixture of personal and professional goals, so stay tuned!
Bye, Alberto.
