It's that time of the year again: New Year's is almost here and I've been reflecting on the past while looking to set goals for the coming year.
I'm making this list of personal goals that I want to achieve in order to advance my skills as a developer, so that I have a quantifiable means of assessing whether the projects that I'm working through are advancing my skills in a direction that I want. In retrospection I've realized that there have been a few times in my professional development career where my rate of learning has stagnated for some period (typically 3-6 months) - when I've essentially just been grinding out the same types of projects in repetition, while learning nothing or next to nothing new while doing so. Coincidentally, I've realized these periods are also closely linked to the periods I've found myself the least invested in the work that I was doing, which is essentially one and the same for me as being unhappy with my work environment. I acknowledge the fact th