Professional Goals
As I am still in my junior years of professional engineering, my goals for the next few years are oriented towards gaining as much technical experience and knowledge as possible. However, I'm also actively looking for opportunities to improve both mentoring and leadership skills.
The more that I've added to this page, the more that I have realised that I am treating it as a "to-do list" of technical challenges and tasks to work on.
Although most of these tasks are short-term, I hope that completing all will collectively project me towards my main goal of gaining as much experience and knowledge as possible.
Improve JavaScript Knowledge and skills
JavaScript forms the basis of my current employment, and I believe it's an engineer's best interest to be "always sharpening your most valuable tools". There is still quite a lot I do not know about JavaScript, and thus I will list a few things here that I wish to improve on.
- Improve Vanilla JavaScript Skills: I can improve on this by reading up on books such as You Don't Know JavaScript, or completing vanilla JavaScript challenges such as JavaScript 30.
- Learn Canvas: I've recently been introduced into the concept of "creative coding", mostly through viewing content posted on dwitter.net. A very basic place to start would be the MDN Canvas tutorial, and then progress onwards from there once completed.
Product/Graphic Design
Graphic design is something I really want to improve on. As a frontend engineer, there is constant collaboration with Product designers in order to clarify requirements and to ensure UI designs are feasible and achievable.
I believe having some product experience would also help me better understand and empathise with design decisions (as well as help me create my own designs). Unfortunately, I did not undertake any UI/UX courses during my time at UTS, and thus I am actively looking for any opportunities to improve my graphic design skills.
Full Stack Development
After 2 years of working across the entire stack at iP Edge, I decided that it was too much to learn everything at once. Now that I am solely working as a Frontend engineer, I have extra capacity to slowly learn more of the backend side of things. In no particular order my current goals are to:
- (Re)learn Java
- Improve database knowledge
- Become AWS Certified
Personal
Alongside my professional goals, I feel it's also good to set aside some personal/life goals, in order to maintain a healthy work/life balance:
- Start up a photography blog
- Snowboard in Japan again
- Own at least two Samoyeds
