Coding in 2015

Happy New Year!

I’ve spent the last few weeks recharging before heading back to school.

It’s about that time of year when people are drawing up their new year’s resolutions (or was I suppose to have done that already?). While 2014 was a great year for helping me get the core algorithms and data structure under my fingers, as well as pick up more than a few new languages and frameworks, there’s always more to learn.

Rather than come up with resolutions – which generally focus on bad habits to break – here are some things I hope to achieve with code in 2015:

• work through an iOS tutorial and build a mobile app that is geographically contextual
• build a long-term, fully tested side project in Node (since building things at hackathons is a completely different skill)
• get an intermediate proficiency (comfortable with syntax, interview capable) in C or C++
•  teach a CS class – I’m TAing a software engineering class and teaching a Java crash course this term so this one should be sorted pretty quick!
•  land a top-tier internship at a company where I can work to build something meaningful
• solve more programming competition style questions (I’m doing a practical algorithms class this term)
• and as graduation starts to inch closer and closer, get a job offer at a company that I know I want to work at

Ambitious? Sure, but why not! Having these goals are going to help me shape how I approach the year and figure out what to prioritize. This list definitely isn’t set in stone. If anything, I have a feeling I’ll be adding more to it fairly soon! At the end of the year, I’ll look over what I’ve done to achieve these goals and what did/didn’t work.