Yay, It that time of year again. I usually set myself some goals each year and to be fair I usually achieve about 50% of them and get close to another 25%. The other 25% are usually just not good ideas!
This blog is mostly about my coding adventures so I will only talk about those goals here. Well when I say goals the most important thing for me is a theme. Last year I decided the theme would be android programming. For the first 8 or 9 months that is what I mostly did, gradually working on a few app as time progressed. Near the end of the year I ended up venturing in to the world of JavaScript in part because I was getting frustrated living without things like lambda. I still like Java just felt the need for something a little higher level. I also wanted to get more into web development which helped motivate the JavaScript choice.
Overall I feel like I achieved a reasonable amount, in particular it was the first year that my at home development actually made any money even if it was a little bit on the small side it was enough to pay for the occasional meal out if we had decided to spend it that way.
This year I have decided that I will devote much of my time to coding in JavaScript. Other languages will be used as well, for instance updating my android apps, but the default will be to use javascript for new projects.
Obviously it will include a reasonable amount of website stuff and over the past few months I have been gradually learning some skills around that area, things like JQuery and CSS. The JavaScript theme does not preclude creating mobile apps as JavaScript is a reasonable language to target android phones with, assuming you don’t want performance although I have not investigated this area at all I am working on the assumption it is viable and it would be slow.
Basically my idea is to make stuff that works on the web and consider porting to android or anything else if it is appropriate.
Now with a theme set I really need to set some goals. This is where it gets hard I have learnt to not set a goal about finishing an app. Particularly given my current views on development. Besides I have only been using JavaScript for a short time so would prefer to be able to try out different ideas and that involves plent of small projects.
Income is popular goal metric. I am tempted to use it but I do not feel that comfortable publishing earning details, it is a British thing. Given I would like to blog about how I am doing this creates conflict in my brain.
A metric I prefer is unique visitors. I could set goals on the number of visitors and I am happy to publish them. They are embarrassing low at the moment but hey what the hell.
As I have two main websites, marblemice.com and this blog, I initially thought to set a visitor goal for each of them and then changed my mind and decide to set a single goal. Get the number of unique visitors to all my web stuff above 2000 per month. To do that I will have to increase the number of visitors by roughly an order of magnitude. Not specifying target for each site give me flexibility. If suddenly I find myself posting numerous blog entries and not much coding I still progress towards my goal and vice-versa. I am left wondering whether 2000 is a bit under ambitious? I think not as I am not planning on getting lucky with some break thought application so expect to have to fight for each unique visitor.
It is a simple goal and does not specify how I reach it. Personally I have found I work best with goals like that. I am happy to report the stats and hopefully you will find it interesting as I embark on a journey of learning how to take websites that are not visited very much to websites the at least have a few visitors. I suspect I am going to learn quite a bit this year.
It should be fun.
This blog is mostly about my coding adventures so I will only talk about those goals here. Well when I say goals the most important thing for me is a theme. Last year I decided the theme would be android programming. For the first 8 or 9 months that is what I mostly did, gradually working on a few app as time progressed. Near the end of the year I ended up venturing in to the world of JavaScript in part because I was getting frustrated living without things like lambda. I still like Java just felt the need for something a little higher level. I also wanted to get more into web development which helped motivate the JavaScript choice.
Overall I feel like I achieved a reasonable amount, in particular it was the first year that my at home development actually made any money even if it was a little bit on the small side it was enough to pay for the occasional meal out if we had decided to spend it that way.
This year I have decided that I will devote much of my time to coding in JavaScript. Other languages will be used as well, for instance updating my android apps, but the default will be to use javascript for new projects.
Obviously it will include a reasonable amount of website stuff and over the past few months I have been gradually learning some skills around that area, things like JQuery and CSS. The JavaScript theme does not preclude creating mobile apps as JavaScript is a reasonable language to target android phones with, assuming you don’t want performance although I have not investigated this area at all I am working on the assumption it is viable and it would be slow.
Basically my idea is to make stuff that works on the web and consider porting to android or anything else if it is appropriate.
Now with a theme set I really need to set some goals. This is where it gets hard I have learnt to not set a goal about finishing an app. Particularly given my current views on development. Besides I have only been using JavaScript for a short time so would prefer to be able to try out different ideas and that involves plent of small projects.
Income is popular goal metric. I am tempted to use it but I do not feel that comfortable publishing earning details, it is a British thing. Given I would like to blog about how I am doing this creates conflict in my brain.
A metric I prefer is unique visitors. I could set goals on the number of visitors and I am happy to publish them. They are embarrassing low at the moment but hey what the hell.
As I have two main websites, marblemice.com and this blog, I initially thought to set a visitor goal for each of them and then changed my mind and decide to set a single goal. Get the number of unique visitors to all my web stuff above 2000 per month. To do that I will have to increase the number of visitors by roughly an order of magnitude. Not specifying target for each site give me flexibility. If suddenly I find myself posting numerous blog entries and not much coding I still progress towards my goal and vice-versa. I am left wondering whether 2000 is a bit under ambitious? I think not as I am not planning on getting lucky with some break thought application so expect to have to fight for each unique visitor.
It is a simple goal and does not specify how I reach it. Personally I have found I work best with goals like that. I am happy to report the stats and hopefully you will find it interesting as I embark on a journey of learning how to take websites that are not visited very much to websites the at least have a few visitors. I suspect I am going to learn quite a bit this year.
It should be fun.
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