This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Compiling 2025.
At the end of 2024, I was listening a lot to Kendrick Lamar’s latest album GNX. One song that I think is brilliant is “Reincarnated”. In the song, Kendrick tells the life stories of two musical artists that have inspired his journey as an artist - John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday. Through these stories, he shares his own journey as a reincarnated version of both artists, their life lessons becoming his own and guiding him toward success. This telling of reincarnation has resonated with me as I navigate a career switch. I think in order to make pivotal changes in our life we are often forced to reinvent ourselves. It’s through this lens that I approach my roadmap for 2025.
Much like in “Reincarnated”, I cannot plan for the future without acknowledging the challenges and lessons of the past. My 2024 coding journey was one of ups and downs: I completed Skillcrush’s Full Stack Development program, I built my first full stack CRUD app, and I built on my learning of Python for frontend development (with Flask) to use it for data analysis, data visualizations, and backend development using a SQLite database. While I had accomplished so much within the first half of the year, I also started looking for opportunities to use my new skillset professionally, which after being rejected or ghosted over 100 times, I felt pretty burned out by the end of 2024.
So now, with 2024 behind me and 2025 in clear view, I am ready to continue to working towards this end goal but with a different approach. In doing so, I don’t want to lose sight of why I decided to become a developer in the first place. Therefore, by making the following goals a habit that will continue throughout my dev career, I hope they can lead to me meeting my end goal:
1. Become a Better Developer:
What is a better developer? After spending the last few years learning the fundamentals—including programming languages, frontend-backend interactions, and server communication—I feel confident in my grasp of these core concepts. However, to me what being a better developer means is not necessarily knowing how to code something (there’s always documentation for that 😃), it’s understanding how to put the various pieces of a site or app together. It’s knowing which components and frameworks to choose from and how they work together to provide a good user experience. It’s deciding when to use one UI component or framework over another. It’s also making decisions on what tools to use to improve site performance and data rendering.
Part of making better decisions is knowing what tools are out there. Tech is constantly changing, there are always new frameworks, libraries, or site generators on the market. There will always be folks in the industry telling you what to build with and why. All of this comes with noise and the overwhelming reality that you’ll never know it all. Which is not my aim, my aim is to simply have an understanding of what’s out there, so that when I hit a unique problem I know where to look for potential solutions. After all being a developer means knowing how to solve problems.
Being a developer also means constantly learning, not only about the tools that are out there, but it also means learning aspects of development you may not be as comfortable with. Therefore in 2025, I am committing to working on more projects to help me build the reflexes to solve problems quicker, learn tools I haven’t used before, and build my web design skills to improve my frontends.
2. Connect With More Developers:
As an introvert, I have found the idea of networking to be daunting. But I know as someone who is trying to transition into this industry, it’s necessary. One thing I learned in 2024, was that I may have been thinking about networking in the wrong way. I was used to the old-fashioned way of networking at an in-person event: where lots of conversations are happening simultaneously, time is limited, and your elevator pitch is the only thing you have to get someone’s attention. While those opportunities still exist and are widely available, it hasn’t been an environment that has necessarily worked well for me. But networking also has moved online, and as devs, we spend a lot of our time online. Therefore, I plan to use more online networks to connect with devs across the globe.
I'm eager to learn from other developers about their experiences in the field: How did they get their start? What drives their personal goals? What are they building, and which tools do they prefer? Though we work in a technical field, we're all human at our core. By connecting with one another, we can keep this humanity at the forefront of our work. After all, technology exists to enhance the human experience—something we can only achieve by embracing our own humanity.
In order to connect with devs, I am committing to being more active in dev-centric networks, some skill-focused (ie. frontend), others more mission-focused (ie. ClimateTech). By being more engaged, I hope to set up calls a few times a month and showcase what I’ve been working on. This brings me to my last goal…
3. Build In Public:
In 2024, I realized that there are many of us developers, and we’re all competing for the same attention, gigs, and jobs. This makes it harder for us to stand out and let our unique attributes shine. So many devs know how to build an app with React for example, but what makes that skill unique for each dev is what else they’re bringing to the table. This is why in 2025, I plan to build more in public. So anytime I am working on a large project or contributing to open source, I plan to post about it. Discussing what the goal was, what problems I came across, and how I solved them. Through this medium I hope my unique approach to web dev shines through.
Building in public is also a great way to work on my first two goals. It’ll help me practice my skills and get feedback from other devs on how they may have approached the problems I faced. It’ll also help me connect with more devs and even potentially become an opportunity for collaboration.
If my 2024 was all about learning and understanding the tech landscape and its opportunities. Then my 2025 is all about refining what I have learned and trying new approaches to navigating this industry. But this year is also an opportunity for me to plan better because I know what hasn’t been working for me in balancing every aspect of my life. This means consistently setting weekly goals, scheduling time to work on tasks, celebrating the small wins, and having grace for myself when I can’t get to something. It also means finding better ways to manage all of these things and check in with myself.
So, to set a clear 2025 roadmap, I will summarize my goals here:
Overarching Intentions:
- Become a Better Developer
- Connect with More Devs
- Build in Public
SMART Goals - Each of these goals below will help to address the overarching intentions:
Sidenote: If you’re not familiar with SMART goals they’re: Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound
- Build at least 2-3 projects (professional or personal) by end of year
- Each project should have a unique, user-friendly, and well-thought-out design (aka. wireframes, design files with a color palette and a typescale etc.)
- Engage with 1-2 developers per month
- Post at least 1-2x a month via Dev and/or LinkedIn
Sub-Goals - These are goals I would like to achieve but will be accomplished through working on the SMART goals above:
- Improve Time Management
- Continue learning through practice, conversation, and reading
- Build public trust in my dev skills
I look forward to working on these goals and to see what opportunities come from accomplishing them. Here’s to a productive 2025 🥂!
If you have similar goals, have found ways to streamline your time management, or have any thoughts on my 2025 roadmap, I would love to hear about it in the comments.
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