It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2018.

Hell, it’s hard to believe it’s already past 2000. I’m still at a point of thinking “10 years ago” was the 1990s and that I just graduated from college a couple of years ago.

As with everyone else, this time of year has me reflecting on the past year’s accomplishments (and explosive failures) and looking to what’s next for the new year. Another year in startups, technology, and learning more about my current vertical–sports and athletics–provided me a volume of life lessons to review as I keep moving forward.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

Walt Disney

This year was great for revamping the developer tool belt–new languages and tools–to enhance productivity and explore the options that exist for developers.

Here’s a few of my favorite stand-outs from 2017 that I’ll be taking into 2018.

Languages

Each year, I look for projects (or make up my own) to learn a couple of new programming languages. While my day-to-day efforts focus primarily on the Microsoft .net environment, new languages are showing up every day and I enjoy looking into them whenever possible.

The full adoption of Kotlin as an Android development language was a breath of fresh air. As I dig further into Android development, it’s been a great language to work with.

I also took a deep dive into Python and Django this year for several side-projects. Python has become my go-to language for complex scripting (the days of perl are dead, I hope) and Django pluggable CMS/web framework has let me focus on getting a applications and prototypes up and going ASAP.

Finally, while I bounced back and forth on rewriting my blog in Django (and may have gone through a few iterations with it), I settled on using Go and Hugo for the job. There’s a whole blog post on the lessons learned available here.

Tools

Visual Studio Code has become my go-to development platform as I’ve jumped into Python and Go environments. I’d originally picked it up as a lightweight editor for writing Lua scripts for various games I play, but have found it as the editor of choice as they expand out the language capabilities and extensions of the environment. I have a few projects planned for asp.net core in early 2018 and look forward to using it even more.

Whether you’re frequently an SSMS user or just need to run a quick query, the new SQL Operations Studio is stellar. Think of it like Visual Studio Code for SQL Server. I’ll have a post soon discussing configuring it’s management widgets.

This year, Firebase became the big tool/platform enhancement for me. While integrations, like Google Analytics, AdMob, and Crashlytics were common across web and mobile apps, further Firebase exposure came with integrating messaging (notifications) and data storage across iOS, Android, and web–all for free (at least at the tiers I’m using it).

What’s next?

Who knows!

With the rapid changes in artificial intelligence, the day-to-day wobble of bitcoin and blockchain technologies (and the associated financial markets), and CES just around the corner, I’m sure we’ll see another year of amazing achievements in STEM and business fields and I hope to capture even just a piece of that in my daily life to keep learning, keep exploring–keep moving forward.