Now that the semester has come to an end and I’ve had a chance to reflect on my web development journey over the last thirteen weeks, I’m looking forward to what’s next. I definitely plan on continuing to hone my web development skills over the next few months. My goals and timeline for the next six months of my coding journey are as follows:

September and October 2017:

• I want to (finally) figure out how to get my custom metabox fields to show up nicely within my custom post page. This is something I spent the last week-and-a-half of the semester working on, but the format in which the data is echoing out to my page is still not to my liking. Getting this to work and look good is my first goal in this post-class web development journey.
• Alter the colors in my child theme, specifically the main menu/navigation bar.
• Reduce the size of my post container to make it a bit more narrow.
• Determine how my web development skills can be worked into my communications plan for my capstone client. My client is a relatively young nonprofit, and I’m hoping this will be a good opportunity to demonstrate firsthand all that I’ve learned throughout this summer.
• Revisit the JavaScript and jQuery courses on Codecademy to see if I can actually complete the lessons without the hints and answers. I relied on the hints the first time I did these lessons, and I want to take these courses again to see if my understanding of the concepts has improved at all since first completing them back in June.

November and December 2017:

• I really want and need to develop some basic skills in the Adobe Creative Suite. I will use my basic Illustrator skills to create a custom logo for my site header.
• Complete the Lynda.com tutorial on programming foundations. (Tip: Lynda is free for Georgetown students!).
• Register and begin training for the 2018 Rock ‘n’ Roll DC Marathon, which is scheduled for March 10, 2018. I’ll document my training leading up to this race on my blog.
• Use my week off during Christmas to explore the Bootstrap framework and see how I might apply it to my site.
• I plan to meet up with my cousin to talk about web development. She will by that time have completed an intensive 16-week program at the DigitalCrafts coding school in Atlanta. I want to get her thoughts on what programming language I should learn next and how I can continue to develop my coding skills.

January and February 2018:

• I hear a lot of people talking about Python, so I plan to dig into the Codecademy lessons for that language. I will (fingers crossed) be done with school by then, which means I’ll have a lot more free time on my hands. I’m considering registering for a Python-based data analysis course through SCS.
• Listen to some coding-related podcasts while I’m doing 15+ mile runs. This will be a good way to zone out while learning something useful and interesting to me.
• I’d love to tackle the development of a WordPress plugin that uses the Strava API and that is actually mobile friendly and responsive. The lack of such a plugin was frustrating to me as I worked on my final project, and I’m eager to see if I can figure out a solution and maybe even register my first plugin on WordPress.

I’m excited about pursuing these goals and look forward to growing my skills in web development. This is a field in which I am truly interested, and I want to learn all that I can in the coming months.