2024 - A Year In Review

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This year has been a strange one for me. I've been thinking it over and I honestly don't know if it has been good or bad. Maybe it's just been meh. It's been a year of some good things but also a lot of nothing.

Some positives:

I turned 30. My fiancée gifted me my new macbook. This was amazing, I'd been learning on a 2011 macbook pro until then and this macbook is like a different world. It's a lot of money and it I really felt that I was taking a bet on myself and working towards my goals.
Time away. Work has been stressful this year. So having some lovely breaks away has been wonderful. A peaceful trip to Wales where I sat and watched the clouds for hours on end was the highlight of these.
My fiancée. She's truly wonderful.

I haven't managed to do anywhere near as much as I would have liked to this year. Time has seemed to fly by, I don't even know where to begin. How is it that I'm almost 31 when only yesterday I turned 30... I had a lot of plans and goals this year that haven't worked out. I'm not going to be hard on myself about this, looking back now I can see how I had very lofty goals and not nearly enough free time to achieve them.

The year ahead

This year I want to focus on smaller, more attainable goals.

Sleeping. I want to get better sleep. I think I've probably averaged 6-6.5 hours a night this year. I'm permanently knackered, some people can get by on 6 hours or less. I'm not one of those people. I would like to get a solid 8 hours asleep every night.
Coding. I want to code as much as I can. I had 131 contributions to my Github last year. This isn't an accurate record as I don't also work on stuff that's on Github but it's a reasonable indication of roughly how much I have done. I'd like it to be higher this year. I'm also planning to keep track of how long I have spent coding on a spreadsheet or something this year. It's not overly me but we'll see what happens.
Publish an app. This is a big one for me. An app on the app store. It doesn't need to be paid, it doesn't need to be a new SAAS. An app I made, available to download for the public.
Contribute to open source. Another big one for me. I'd love to contribute to something this year.
Drink more water. Simple but something I struggle with.
Social Media. I want to engage and post more but equally spend less time doom scrolling. Finding the balance will be important.

Are these smaller? Who knows? Will I accomplish them all. No, probably not but that's okay too. As long as I do my best then I can look back on the year and see progress then I will be happy.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a wonderful year!

An Introduction

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Hello everyone. This is a short blog post to introduce myself and my hopes and plans for this blog.

My name is Mike and I am learning to code around my full time job. It's been slow progress. I've been learning for over a year now and I'm only just launching my portfolio website. You might notice that it is a little bear bones right now, with only home, contact and blog pages. I'm working on the others but I wanted to get it up and out there so I can start posting my thoughts to this blog.

I'm working towards becoming a mobile developer, reason being I use my phone for everything. I do my banking on there, I book holidays, I watch youTube, emails etc. It's my go to. I do have a laptop, a lovely Macbook, but my phone is always with me and my laptop is not. When I first started looking into coding, I started with web development but it just felt a little bit off. I wanted to hold it in my hands and have it on my home screen, hence the move into mobile development. Obviously as I have learnt more I know now that I could have built a PWA for this, and in the future I may do so but I want to stay in my area of focus and keep learning and building.

As I started with web development React Native felt like the normal, rational choice for me. I really like it, it feels intuitive and with the help of expo, getting something up and working on a phone is simple. I have been using this to build a few apps so far. I have a simple gratitude app that stores your entries to the SQLite db on the phone. I have also built a more in depth hotel booking app which uses a couple of different APIs to search for hotels on your requested nights etc. I may write more about these in the future.

I was listening to The HanselMinutes Podcast recently where they mentioned always learning two programming languages at the same time. This for me was interesting, I wanted to learn Android and Kotlin but didn't want to split my focus too much but this was the push that I needed. So I am also learning to build native Android Apps. For this I am using Jetpack Compose and Kotlin. I am right at the beginning of my journey into this so I haven't yet build anything of substance with it.

This brings me on to what I hope for this blog. I'm planning to use it to showcase apps I've built. Maybe some small tutorials, mostly so I'm able to come back in the future for a quick reminder about how something was done. It will be a reminder to myself of how much I have learnt and how far I have come. I am still at the start of my journey and I am so excited to keep learning.

If you would like to follow me all the links to my socials are at the bottom of the page. I don't post much but I am trying to post more frequently. Or you can contact me via my contact form!

Mike Watkins' Blog

2024 - A Year In Review

Some positives:

The year ahead

An Introduction