This is where I keep track of my tech goals every year to keep myself on track in my tech career journey.
2023 Goals
My goal for 2023 is to:
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Get back to delivering talks in at least 1 meetup by June 2023 and 1 tech conference by September 2023.
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Block out a weekend every month to write a tech post that documents my learning journey - sharing with a wider audience would be a bonus.
- Start generating content ideas that goes beyond technical implementation by reading and actively taking notes interesting things I read.
- Part of technical leadership is about being aware of the bigger picture and being a better human. This is one of the ways I intend to act upon my mentor’s advice to build up my expert power.
- Continue learning functional programming through writing more Scala code and documenting my learnings through my functional programming series
- This is a longer-term project that I intend to shape gradually on the side, to bridge the learning gap for data practitioners who would like to learn Scala for functional programming.
- Monetize my speaking engagements / expertise through designing a data engineering course (and other side hustles)
2022 Goals
My goal for 2022 is to:
Attain my seniority and become a Senior Data Engineer- Update 2022-08-27: As of 2022-08-08, I am a Senior Data Engineer.
- Speak at PyCon 2022 (Might as well give it another try, right?)
- Rejected. :sadface:
- Deliver talks in 2 tech conferences locally and internationally
- Pivoted away to focus on my career transtiion.
Pass AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty exam by March 2022- Update 2022-08-27: Passed as of 2022-05-07.
- Enhance my Github portfolio with a meaningful side project that demonstrates end-to-end data / machine learning solutions
- Update 2022-08-27: I am currently working on a meaningful side project that demonstrates end-to-end data solutions for a non-profit. Not sure if the code repository (if any) would be hosted on Github though.
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Continue learning functional programming through writing more Scala code and documenting my learnings through my functional programming series
- Write a tech post every month to document my learning journey and share with a wider audience
- Update 2022-08-27: Due to turbulent changes in my personal and professional life, I would have to cut down on documenting my learning journey publicly for the time being.
- Make regular weekly updates to my TIL blog, which is built using Pelican
- Similar to above; currently using Notion for quick note-taking on the go and still trying to find a suitable TIL approach that works for me.
- Monetize my speaking engagements / expertise through designing a data engineering course (and other side hustles)
2021 Goals
My goal for 2021 is to:
- Speak at PyCon 2021 (I can dream, right?)
- Standby :sadface:
- Deliver talks in 4 tech conferences locally and internationally
- Tally: 4 (2 pre-recorded, 2 virtual live)
- Update 2021-10-31: Goal achieved - With my last live talk at PyData Global 2021 and the next conference (PyCon APAC 2021) being a pre-recorded talk, I have wrapped up on tech speaking for year 2021 and will be planning for year 2022.
Pass CKAD exam by August 2021- Enhance my Github portfolio with meaningful side projects that demonstrate end-to-end data solutions
- Learn functional programming through writing Scala code and documenting my learnings
- Update 2021-12-31: Completed first two articles for my functional programming series
- Write tech posts at least once a month to document my learning journey and (hopefully) share with more people
- Update 2021-12-31: I tried, but burnout and imposter syndrome got the better of me. :sadface:
- Make regular weekly updates to my TIL blog, which is built using Pelican
- Update 2021-12-31: Same as above :sadface:
Make at least 4 Pull Requests on open-source projects- Abandoned due to multiple competing commitments in advancing my tech career
- Monetize my speaking engagements / expertise through designing a data engineering course (and other side hustles)
- Update 2021-12-30: Made a tiny first step! Stay tuned for more updates.
2020 Goals
My goal for 2020 is to:
Speak at a headliner tech conference in Asia- Update 2020-01-16: I will be speaking at FOSSASIA Summit 2020 in Singapore, which is on 19 - 21 March 2020.
- Update 2020-03-22: Goal achieved - I spoke at FOSSASIA Summit 2020 on 20 March 2020. It was a relatively muted conference this time due to COVID-19, but it’s a good start. Reflection on talk here
Speak at a tech conference outside of Asia (preferably in Europe and/or North America)(and hope I do not embarrass my country on the international stage)- Update 2020-05-21: I will be speaking at EuroPython 2020 Online, which is on 23 - 26 July 2020. This is a significant milestone for me as it will be my first time speaking at Europe’s largest Python conference, and I am immensely honoured to be sharing the (virtual) stage with highly-esteemed speakers in the global Python community.
- Deliver talks in at least 4 tech conferences locally and internationally
- Tally: 7 (5 with 1 talk, 1 with 2 talks, 1 invited keynote)
- Note: Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, international travel to conferences is made virtually impossible and many conferences have been moved online.
- Update 2020-12-12: I delivered my first invited keynote at PyCode Conference 2020.
- Enhance my Github portfolio with more side projects
- Write more tech posts to document my learning journey and (hopefully) share with more people
- Make more regular updates to my TIL blog, which is built using Pelican
- Make at least 4 Pull Requests on open-source projects
- Tally: 5 (3 merged, 1 aborted, 1 in progress)
- Current research interest: Temporal analysis of large-scale transportation networks to model the evolution of epidemic networks and predict COVID-19 trends.
- As a beneficiary of open source, I look forward to taking part in online sprints to contribute to open source projects that have benefited the data community.
- Update 2020-12-26: Another pull request to pandas 1.2 merged!
2019 Goals
My goals for 2019 was to:
Speak at a tech meetup(and hope my reputation in the tech community does not go down the drain)- Update 2019-09-01: Goal achieved - I did my first-ever public tech meetup talk on 27th August 2019, and over 100 people attended my talk (a larger turnout than usual). Reflection on talk here.
- Build up my Github portfolio
- I uploaded more repositories on Github, filed issues on BigDataX workshop repos, and even made a pull request on pandas-dev!
- Write more tech posts to document my learning journey and (hopefully) share with more people
Speak at a tech conference so that I can share what I’ve learnt with even more people- Update 2019-08-22: I will be speaking at Women Who Code CONNECT Asia 2019 in Singapore on 31st August 2019. See you there!
- Update 2019-09-01: Goal achieved - I delivered my first-ever conference talk on 31st August 2019. Reflection on talk here
Make my first Pull Request on an open-source project- Update 2020-01-03: Goal achieved My first pull request on pandas 1.0 was merged!