2021: The year I master continuous delivery

I'm counting down the days until I'm unemployed. It's like 10, maybe 9 days? I don't know.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do once I'm free from the responsibilities of employment. I've realized that I'm an applications developer and not a framework developer. I've realized I want to build things that optimize for real-world satisfaction instead of screen time. Directionally, these are helpful maybe? I don't know.

Then I consider what my goals are. I want to be able to continuously deliver software by myself, from design to development to deployment.

Continously. Deliver.

Basically, I want to be empowered to own every part of development.

The toll of not having a true CI/CD pipeline set up with automated testing has taken a mental toll on me for the past six months. I was explaining this to a friend earlier, and she said she didn't quite get it.

I told her, "You know how you send out weekly newsletters? Imagine you labor over a news letter and get everything perfect. Now imagine that hours after you send the emails, your boss tells you half the words are spelled wrong. You look on your computer and you did everything right, but somehow after hitting the "send" button, everything got messed up. Yikes.

This has been the reality of me deploying software for the entirety of the time I've been a developer. It's unpredictable, anxiety-inducing and I'm over it. There are better ways to do the job.

I want to build applications that enhance peoples' lives. But to do this, I'm beginning to recognize that I need to first optimize for the tools and practices that enable continous delivery.

2021 will be the year that I learn Docker deeply. 2021 will be the year that I make Jenkins a part of my everyday workflow. And 2021 will be the year that I prioritize tests.

The most imporant thing I can do in 2021 is master deployment and operations. So that's exactly what I intend to do.