Goodbye 2017, Hello 2018!
So here we are. Less than 70 hours of 2017 to go until the end of the year and the end of this festive period. We start again in January which, in my opinion, really is like the "Monday Morning" of the year.
Over the past year, you may have noticed that I have consistently posted every single week on a Friday. Where I haven't is because of the Ghost scheduler being faulty and not posting, but I have always had a post ready.
This was a challenge that I set myself and I actually started last October. It really was a challenge!
Finding stuff to write about every single week was hard. Some weeks were easy as I may have encountered a problem or learnt something in my day-to-day work that I got to talk about. I also had a list of ideas of things that I wanted to try out that I think would be cool. But some weeks, I would get to Thursday with still no idea what to write.
I am also a terrible procrastinator, so I really would leave things to the last minute by which time, it was too late to write about things that were a little more involved.
But I felt that I had to complete a full year of this and now that the year has finished, I can now stop with the weekly posts.
I am still going to blog, but it will be when I have something to post not forcing something out every single week.
On the whole, it has been a great experience as it has forced me to learn things that I probably would not have if I didn't have this pressure to write. There is also stuff that I blogged about that has been in drafts for as long as this blog has existed (the crazy programming language challenge, for example). I also covered many topics that I myself have looked back on when I have needed that knowledge again.
Committing one post a week was taking up all of the time that I had for side projects. But now that I have that time freed up again, I can now pursue other projects.
I am not going to list here all the things that I hope to do, as quite often, I never stick to it. Back in 2014, I wrote about what I wanted to do in 2015. These included building an android game and writing a book. As we enter 2018, these are still on my list as not done - so I think this shows how I don't really stick to things. Even back then, I said, "I have found if I write all these in a list, I will get none of them done".
Other cool things from that happened this year include (but are not limited to):
- I became a Twig certified designer
- I made my first ever contribution to an open source project (the ability to specify a side to the trim function in Twig!)
- I went to multiple great conferences, most notably, the annual PHP Conference as well as JeffConf which was great
- Many day trips and events throughout the year including a great holiday in Cornwall
- I finally did a stadium tour of White Hart Lane stadium before it was demolished
- I became a Tottenham season ticket holder which was a surprise
It is always exciting to look at the year ahead with its endless potential to be amazing and I will do what I can to make that potential become reality.
I hope you all have a successful and fulfilling 2018!