My 2015 road-map for continued success and personal development.

This year I plan on changing up the process just a little bit. While I still want to have a few goals that are for the year as a whole, I also want to come up with one super simple and achievable items for each month. The reason for this is that, upon reviewing last year, it became clear that there wasn’t a whole lot to keep things happening. So, this year I want to ensure that there are activities with enough frequency to keep the engagement and excitement - while still being realistic.

This years list…

Get my Certified ScrumMaster Certificate from the Agile Alliance I have taken ScrumMaster training twice now, but the first time (two years ago) I didn’t take the certification test. This time I want to have that certificate. If anything just to give me that feeling of accomplishment and add to my LinkedIn profile. This was a December goal, but the holidays caused a delay; should be done in the next week.
Get my AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate Certification This is my January goal and it shouldn’t be too hard; I’ve been studying for it for months. My goal is to take the test in the middle of January and with luck on my side, I can add it to my email signature.
Complete the Chef course from Linux Academy This one is for February. While I’ve used Chef in AWS for simple, trivial things, I want to go through a more formal training process and learn how to use it to the full extent. I feel that this is a must have for growing my role as a Solutions Architect.
Attend at least one startup, entrepreneurial or dev meetup event each month. This one shouldn’t be that hard as there is a litany of these events in Southern California. Hearing and seeing other peoples excitement helps get me excited as well.
Visit three startups or tech companies and get a tour This one is for fun. Last year I had a complete blast visiting a friend at GitHub and this year I want to continue that. I work in an “enterprise” setting, so its fun and refreshing to see how smaller, more agile shops do things.
Produce one product of my own Yup… this old gem. Its actually not that far off in reality. I have a working initial version, but I need to add the accounting bits and improve the error handling. With focus and some luck, this one will stick. Fortunately, I’ve chosen to build it on the wonderful Laravel framework, which has functionality to make a lot of this simple. It even includes Laravel Cashier which is an interface to Stripe. Like my friend Josh Northcott always says - its “Awesome Sauce.”
Listen to or read at least one entrepreneurial book every other month I did this with both The 4-Hour Workweek and Rework, so this is a no-brainer. My daily commute to and from work is about 45 minutes of prime listening time. Its tough being employed full time, a father of two young children and a supportive husband - and be able to sit down for hours to read. However, theres plenty of time between things to listen to books and gain knowledge!
Set Reminders and pick real dates In order to help ensure these get done, I plan on setting up regular reminders to review progress and ensure each months activities are planned and have been done. If one was missed, it should be made up for in some fashion. Some of these I plan on inviting others to participate in. This should not only help ensure they happen, but also help make them fun.

As usual, I will continue to finesse these throughout the year and am open to suggestions. I wish you all luck with your goals. 2015 is going to be a truly great year. I hope you do everything you can to make it YOUR year.