I’m Donna, and I’m a goal-setter. At the start of every year, I like to review my list of goals from the previous year to see just how much (or how little) I accomplished. My husband has never been a fan of this approach. He likes to say that it’s only going to make you feel badly when you look back at all that you failed to do in the last twelve months. While there is undoubtedly some truth to this, I’m of the opinion that those who never try, never achieve.
So, at the beginning of 2014, just as I’ve done for the past several years, I put together my lengthy list of goals. I know that it’s an aggressive list, and it’s highly unlikely that all of the items will be crossed off come December 31st, but I’m OK with that. And because I’m OK with that, it means that I’ll be able to dodge those negative feelings that my husband keeps talking about.
This year, I have a number of things that I would like to achieve professionally as a Web Developer. Here’s what that list looks like:
- Contribute to existing open source projects.
- Put my own open source projects on Github.
- Build up my reputation on Stack Overflow (it’s currently at a pitiful 28).
- Get involved in software development for women.
- Attend WPGTA WordPress meetups.
All good things, right? Oddly enough, I realized that my list was lacking the most important item of all – setting up my own personal website. Up until now, I’d relied on LinkedIn to extol my virtues, but LinkedIn on its own is not enough. Given that I work full-time as a front-end Web Developer, I know that there are things that I learn that may be beneficial to others in the programming community, and having my own blog would enable me to share them. Last year, I also started dabbling with WordPress a bit more, and I needed to have a central place to host the documentation for some plugins that I’ve built.
It was a no-brainer to decide to finally launch my own website. I registered a domain name, selected a WordPress theme, made some slight modifications to it, installed a few essential plugins, set up Google Analytics, and within a few hours I had this website! Of course, it’s still a work-in-progress, but it’s a good starting point.
So, what can you expect from this blog? As I work primarily with front-end technologies, you can expect tips & tricks for languages such as Javascript, jQuery, HTML and CSS. I’m also a lover of all things WordPress, so there will likely be more than a few posts about it as well.
Please feel free to leave a comment or start a discussion on any post, even if it’s just to point out how wrong I am. Especially if it’s to point out how wrong I am!
Cheers.