A new year has started and I feel the need to assess what went well, and what didn’t.
Did I meet my professional goals?
As a quick reminder, here were my professional goals for 2016:
Get more traffic on this website
In December 2015 I had 4,234 users on my website with a bounce rate of 86.48 %. In 2016, I wanted to attract 7,500 users and lower the Bounce Rate to 75%.
I did not fully meet that goal. In 2016 I attracted only 1,497 users to my website. However, my bounce rate decreased from 86.48% to 61.72%. I can live with that result since the more important metric improved by 26.13%. Having a low bounce rate means that fewer people left my site without interaction. Hence, my website has become more relevant and interesting to my site visitors. The average session duration increased from 1 minute and 10 seconds to 1 minute and 30 seconds.
I will continue to improve my bounce rate by writing even more relevant and interesting content, but I will stop caring about the user count. Professionally 2016 was a successful year, which means that less is more, if the right audience is captured by my website.
Adopt a Development Workflow with Docker
I did not find time to work on this goal and will adjust it slightly. Instead of trying to figure out a development workflow with Docker, I will work on automizing my server provisioning process using Chef in combination with Knife Zero. Additionally, I will implement a deployment process that relies on Capistrano. This all will save me a lot of time, which is essential as a freelancer. (Don’t worry if these geeky terms mean nothing to you 🙂 )
Public Speaking as a Means to Communicate in a Professional Way
While I didn’t join a Toastmasters Club, I did publish a lot of live video streams, educating people about various aspects regarding technology and business. I would love if you started subscribing to my YouTube channel!
By the way, here is my most viewed video so far:
Help More Women and Girls Become Developers
This is a goal I definitely worked towards, and I am happy to report that I made progress. I started teaching a coding bootcamp where 50% of my students were female. Here is a blog post written by Emma Hernandez, describing her experience.
I also started becoming an active supporter of Women Learning to Code: San Antonio.
Overall I am pretty happy with this summary for my 2016 professional goals.
How about you?
I am curious – have you defined a list of goals for 2017 as well? Or maybe you had goals for 2016 too, and you want to share with me how well you did realizing them?
Whether professional or personal, please share your goals with me. You’ll see, letting someone else know about your intentions is powerful and will increase the likelihood of you actually realizing them.