2018 The Story So far
Tags: softwaredevelopment, goals, career, development
Published: 2019-11-14 11:11:42

---
title: 2018 The Story So far
published: true
date: 2018-07-28 18:15:29 UTC
tags: SoftwareDevelopment,goals,career,development
canonical_url: https://www.funkysi1701.com/posts/2018-the-story-so-far-1lkf
---

Remember me? I used to write blog posts but somehow life got in the way. So much has happened this year, lets have a look at my [goals](https://dev.to/funkysi1701/lets-see-what-2018-can-do-38o1-temp-slug-2157705) for 2018 and see how far we have got with them.

### Buy a house

My first goal for 2018 was to buy a house. Well so much progress has been made with this goal.

We looked at a few houses, and have made an offer, had it accepted and are waiting for the last few things to get arranged before we start arranging to move in.

The location we decided upon was [Thorne](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Thorne,+Doncaster/). This is about an hour from York where most of our friends are and my wife has lived all her life, and also an hour from where my family live. I have tried my best to balance location and size of property and we think our new home is going to be a good balance but only time will tell.

I have a bit of a mammoth time ahead of me getting everything we own packed up and moved to our new home so wish me luck, but we will get there it is just going to be hard work.

### New Job

In June 2018 I started a new job. This was slightly later than I had hoped but I believe it has been worth the wait.

My new job has lots of perks. Finish early on a Friday (1pm), On site canteen, Cool air-conditioned office, Flexible working hours, Part of a big development team.

The main benefit is that I am part of a big development team. I have a huge list of things to learn both in terms of technology and how large development teams function. The team is about to finish the first sprint that I have contributed to. My contributions have been very small. A bug fix here, a tweak of an API there. But the important thing is that I am making a contribution and learning along the way.

I have also started asking questions about deployment and how this could be automated. Something that interests me, especially with the sysadmin and devops background. I have been tasked with learning [docker](https://docs.docker.com/), so expect some blog posts on this topic in the near future.

### See more of family

This one I am going to count as a miss. I have seen family a few times this year, but my efforts have been more on the first two items in this list. Hopefully this will change as things settle down.

### Celebrate 5 years of Marriage

Me and the wife had a great weekend away to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

### Celebrate my two children

Not happened yet but it is booked and we just need to arrange a few more details.

### Lightning Talk

I have made no effort to do a talk and this is going to be a goal for 2019 I think. Most of the reason is concentrating on the other areas above, but also because I am not a natural speaker and I don’t like stepping out of my comfort zone. But I will do it, I just need to wait for other things to calm down a bit first.

### Family Holiday

We had a great week away at the start of July. The weather was really great (and still is) and we had lots of time doing things as a family.