June was a busy month. I'm excited for July because a) the weekends are looking free (no travel or events so far) and b) I have a project I'm excited to work on 😄

But before I share any updates, here's a bit of reflection on goal-related stuff for June.

Achievements

Here, I’ll share the goal followed by the related achievement of the month after the arrow.

Intellectual

• Launch 2 projects on Product Hunt -> Finished MVP for mentored.dev

So I didn't "complete" this goal but I hit a milestone. I had been talking to my friends about finishing mentored for a while. My project board on GitHub was filled with all these awesome features I wanted to build.

But while chatting at the Phoenix ReactJS meetup, we had a realistic conversation. And they said, "What are the remaining features you need to add to be 'done' with a v1?"

I thought for a second. Okay, they're right. I need to cut scope and get this out the door. So I moved everything to the backlog and only added the key pieces - saving progress to local storage and improving the UI flow.

I did all that and shared a Twitter thread about the journey this weekend. It felt really good. It was scary, but I had put in a lot of time and effort and I was excited to share it.

I'm not sure where I'll take it next but this marks the completion of the first phase.

Professional

• Write 6 articles -> 2 dev.to articles written! (Total: 3/6)

I think I was on a teaching/writing "high" this past month because I knocked out two articles. Actually, what made it "easy" was writing the articles as I was learning two new things. I thought it would help me solidify the learning if I wrote it as I learned.

The first was "React Native - Adding App Icons for Android " where I shared the basics of adding app icons to Android. I started learning React Native and wanted to do the simplest thing: add an icon to my app.

After a lot of misunderstanding, I finally got it working 😃 So I wrote the article to a) help me remember and b) share what I learned.

The second article I wrote was titled "How to Create Code Profiles in VSCode ". My wife is letting me borrow her personal laptop until I save up enough to buy my own personal laptop. So, while setting things up, I decided I would try a technique used by a fellow egghead instructor - code profiles. They're basically a saved state of your settings.json for VSCode. This is helpful when recording screencasts where you need a larger font size for instance. I wrote this one while going through a README on GitHub to better understand it.

Updates

Being at the halfway point in 2019, I've decided reevaluate my goals I set back in January.

Although I've made progress towards some of these goals, I would like to change direction and get more specific. My long-term goal is to achieve what I call "freedom of time" - the ability to spend your time how you like every day. Some call this financial independence.

I've spent some time mind-mapping to think about how I can get there and so I want my goals to align with that. For July, I'm going to be focusing on one project: a new egghead course related to React and npm packages 👀

I wouldn't say anymore but keep your eyes peeled for a blog post and a new egghead course.

That's all folks! Until next month!

[Photo by Nitish Meena on Unsplash]