My 2020 Roadmap

2020 is going to be a big year for me. I just turned 26 years old in December, I’m progressing in my career, and many of life’s challenges await me as I stumble my way through the months. I wanted to write up what I believe is my current list of challenges and roadmap pieces for this year.

Getting Married

I’m getting married in 2020 to the love of my life. She and I have been together for 5 years and she supported me while I finished my undergraduate degree in computer science, meaning she’s a huge part of the reason I’m successful today. I am so thankful for her and looking forward to the rest of our lives together! She’s also learning to code, mostly doing frontend development with HTML/CSS/JS, and I’m so proud of her!

Learning C

My ultimate goal is to become a robotics software engineer, specifically at NASA. I want to learn the “lingua franca” of embedded development this year and learn it well. Maybe I’ll even try to contribute to a kernel.

My motivations for learning C are simple: I’m tired of the bloat in today’s software engineering. Too often developing a new product mostly involves stitching together libraries and cloud products from somebody else. I feel like a overpaid plumber doing this. I want to get back to the basics. Yes, using other’s libraries and products makes sense at times, but I don’t think entire products should be built this way.

Also, no one seems to care that applications have bloated beyond belief. I have heard a lot of times in my career that inefficient code does not matter because of how efficient computers and processors are today. I feel like this is a step in the wrong direction, and I would like to rebel by making a personal decision to never use more resources than necessary. I want my code to be lean, mean, safe, and for it to run forever.

Starting and Growing My Business

I’ve got a consulting business now that I formed in the latter half of 2019, and if you’d like to contact me for any help please do @ 703-419-0679 OR jacob.windle@protonmail.com! My skillset is quite diverse from years of working with startups and I’d love to help bring your idea to life!

I started picking up side gigs in the summer of July 2019 with no plans on stopping. So far I’ve built a full-stack continuing education platform with Django and React for a client. The challenge of being the sole developer on a project like that was very fun for me, and wearing every hat during the lifecycle of a project is something I enjoy greatly.

A Post a Month

I let this blog go sometimes, with months passing before I write another post. In 2020, I will write one post a month. Creating content and coding are both very satisfying for me, and it’s time to ramp it up.

A Book a Month

Reading is very important, not only for maintaining sanity but also sharpening your mental game. In 2020, I want to read one book a month.

Side Project Every Quarter

This is my most ambitious goal for 2020 but I feel it’s the most important. There are times at my full-time job that not much coding happens. Times like these naturally happen, and that’s okay, but I need to keep my skills sharp. Breaking the year down into 3 month increments makes it easier to plan and execute projects that I’d like to complete. This first quarter I will be finishing my C project, hb, which will be a daemon that managed the hosts file.

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