Thoughts and reflections heading into 2017

2016

For the last few years I have been on loan to various interesting R&D projects within the company. This has allowed me to focus on my passion for software development, but it has also left me without a place in the company to really call home.

Then sometime last year a new department was formed within the company, focusing on digital services and innovation. I knew the manager for this new department since we had been working within the same R&D umbrella for a while before. So in September I ended up joining the new department, Digital Services & Innovation as a software developer.

The last four months working for DSI has been really fun. We have a great team of developers who are all really passionate about what they do. So I am looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in 2017!

2017

Starting of the new year there are a few things I want to focus on in addition to my regular work.

Blogging

I want to continue writing about things that interest me within the realm of software development. I have gotten good feedback on the little content I have put together so far. Not to mention a few interesting opportunities have already presented themselves as a direct consequence of my blog.

That is really cool to see! I have also enjoyed the process so far. Even though it does take quiet a bit of time.

Coding Dojo

This is an idea that me and a colleague at work came up with at the end of last year. We both are passionate about what we do in our daily work. But there is so much new cool stuff that we would like to explore and learn about.

So heading into 2017 we are planning on setting aside time once a week to stay behind at work once we “clock-out” for the day. Then we can pair up and work on other stuff that we are interested in.

For now we have a few open source projects we would like to contribute too and we have also talked about spending some time learning more about Ionic 2.

Read more

I would like to spend some more time reading. I used to read a lot of novels from Tom Clancy, Daniel Silva, Brad Thor, Clive Cussler and other similar authors.

But I would also like to read some more books related to software development. I bought Joshua Morony`s new Ionic 2 e-book during x-mas and I have a few other books that I have not had time to start on yet.

Conferences

Last year I did not get to attend a single software development conference which was kind of a bummer. For the past few years I have at least managed to go to NDC Oslo which is always a good time.

So I hope to be able to attend some conferences this year to learn new things, get inspired and meet new people.

Do some more consulting outside of work

The last few months of 2016 I did some consulting for a friends company. Building a mobile app in Ionic 1 for an accounting firm, built a small spring-boot backend running on Heroku and some Auth0 integration for another client.

I especially enjoyed working on the mobile application with Ionic. That was really fun and a big reason for why I bought the Ionic 2 book from Josh.

So hopefully there will be more opportunities like this in 2017.

Wrapping up

Really optimistic and enthusiastic about this next year. Things are looking good at work, and I have a lot of interesting stuff to do outside of work.

So 2017, BRING IT ON! :)

Written by Thomas Bembridge Software Developer working at SpareBank 1 in Norway. Opinions and ideas shared through this blog are my own. Follow me on Twitter!