2017 Game Plan
2016 was an important year for me because I decided to quit college so I could work full time as an iOS Freelancer. 2017 will be the year I get my shit together.
I won’t study at a college anymore; I won’t work in a 9–5 job and this is very scary because my success will only come if I organize myself on things I want to learn and work on, so I will be checking this list every month to ensure I’m doing my best on completing my goals.
I organized this post in topics I find important for me to grow as a developer and as well as a human. I also decided to turn this personal list into a blog post so people can read and learn something new and give their opinions on my goals and other things I can do to succeed.
Freelancing
I quit college to pursue my career as an iOS Developer, so 2017 will be the first year I’ll work full time as an iOS Developer. I decided that I don’t want to apply for jobs right now because I want to try to work as a freelancer. Why? Because I like the freedom and I want to attend a lot of conferences this year, so being a freelancer gives me this freedom to go to other countries any time I want.
Money
My Goal is to have enough projects to save $2000 per month, after all my living costs starting March. I’ll be checking how’s my progress towards this goal twice a month to see if I’m on track and if not, what I can change to be on track.
This money will be used towards my new devices, conferences and trips.
Open Source
Open source is the love of my life. This love started with AwesomeiOS and it keeps growing every single day.
In 2017 I want to improve AwesomeiOS with the following tasks:
• AwesomeiOS new Website: will provide a really cool way to search for the libs you’re looking for
• Twitter bot: Today our Twitter bot is really bad and I want to improve it so our followers can discover new libs easily than looking through a README of 1000+ libs
• AwesomeiOS.Weekly: will show information about the newsletter, giving the option for new users to subscribe and see past issues. Also, our newsletter is very ugly, so I’ll work on improving it’s template.
Besides AwesomeiOS, I’ll be working on EZSwiftExtensions, as well as other libs I love.
Going Outside iOS
Last year I believe I did a pretty good job on broadening my programming skills by coding something besides Swift. I wrote a lot of small Python scripts and actually got a job as a PHP developer.
As a freelancer, I think it is indispensable to know a little about each part of the process: planning, design, iOS and backend. So this year I’ll learn more about structuring a REST API in Python — This will allow me to help my fellow backend devs to make decisions on how to organize a backend on my freelance projects. I’ll also be able to work more on Continuous Integration and maybe one day work as a backend developer in a freelance project.
Books
I’m not a big book person, but I’ll do my best on completing one pomodoro a day on a book. My currently list of books are: “The Pragmatic Programmer”, “Cracking the Code Interview”, “Steve Jobs” and “Ready Player One”
New Languages
Last year I traveled to Berlin, Germany and I started to learn German in Duolingo. I was spending 30 minutes a day on Duolingo and I really liked the experience.
I’m already fluent in Portuguese, English and fine with Spanish, so having a basic German will be the next goal.
Blog
I already wrote about why I wanted to start writing more and creating my blog, so I’ll do my best on writing 3–4 posts a month about programming, life as a developer and freelancer and other things I find interesting.
Conferences
Last year I attended WWDC and try!Swift NYC and it was just amazing. I loved to meet new people and be inspired to be a better developer by watching really smart people I respect talking about amazing topics.
My goal this year is to attend 3–5 conferences, which will be WWDC, try!Swift NYC and others I’m still researching about.
I’ll definitely try to blog more about what I learned on each conference in order to share the knowledge, as well as retain what I learned.
Meetups
The iOS community here in Brazil is really amazing. They have a huge Slack group and meetups every month. This year I want to speak more at meetups and help organize more events over here. I learned a lot from the community in San Francisco and I’ll do my best on bringing some things I’ve learned to the groups here in Brazil.
I currently have 7659 Emails in my inbox. It’s been 4 months since I started working towards the 0 inbox life, so this year I’ll reorganize all my emails in Reminders’ tasks instead of just leaving them in my inbox.
Final Thoughts
It’s January 3rd and there’s a lot to be done, but I can’t wait to start on this new adventure and share with you guys what worked and what didn’t work about this plan.
Hope you guys enjoyed!
BTW, I’m an iOS freelancer👍 If you’re looking for one, you can go to my website
Special Thanks to Göktuğ Yılmaz for helping me with the post 🚀
