The New Year is the perfect moment to start fresh, make changes or find time for things you've been putting off. Making resolutions, both personal and professional, is a way to hold yourself and others accountable (or at least that's the hope) and the perfect way to ensure 2016 gets off on the right foot. At the beginning of the year, we asked the CommonPlaces team what their personal and professional resolutions were for 2016. Here are our 2016 resolutions:
Ben Bassi
Professional: To continue to improve customer satisfaction by implementing new support programs and product offerings.
Personal: Save 15 lives by giving blood 5 times this year. The American Red Cross says a blood donation saves up to 3 lives. Every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs blood and more than 41,000 blood donations are needed every day. I encourage everyone to give blood to save lives.
Michael Reich
Professional: Do a better job of delegating responsibilities to free up time for managing the team better. I need to be able to let go.
Personal: Road bike at a minimum 3 days a week. The ultimate goal is to compete in the PMC (Pan Mass Challenge).
Kendra Strickler
Professional: This year I promise to be proactive and continue to push the envelope in all our Marketing efforts and to continue to educate myself on new technologies and trends in the ever changing industry.
Personal: I also resolve to reading more books than I buy this year. Maybe I'll finally make a dent on my bookshelf.
Kami Raleigh
Professional: Continue to learn all of the "ins and outs" of CommonPlaces and grow with the team.
Personal: Floss everyday. (Don't judge, I have a 2 year old. Some days I feel lucky to leave the house with pants on.)
Lemu Santos
Professional: Be more efficient and make our customers more satisfied.
Personal: Read more books, consume less and live more.
Bryan Campbell
Professional: I would like to get more experience with wireframing and I still want to learn Python.
Personal: This year I would like to make being in the great outdoors a priority. Skiing, fishing, kayaking, hiking, camping - all of it. I didn’t get enough of it in last year so this year I will make time for it.
Colby Johnson
Professional: I resolve to improve my programming ability by reaching out and exploring new languages I have not yet played with. I would love to become more proficient in some of the leading and growing programming paradigms. There is an endless ocean of knowledge out there. I just have to find it.
Personal: I resolve to make more altruistic decisions throughout my life. I would like to help people more no matter how subtle the kindness. New Year's resolutions are so self centered. This year I want to make it more about everyone else and less about me.
Emily Burns
Professional: I would like to make an effort to attend more networking events within the area. I feel like it’s important to build relationships with other business professionals and a great place to learn and keep up with industry trends.
Personal: I recently started to take up hiking, as I was looking for more activities to do with my puppy. This fall, we had a vacation planned to Park City, UT. We decided while out there, we would make the road trip to Zion National Park and climb Angels Landing. If you ever get the chance, I’d highly recommend it as the scenery was amazing. Although I did the majority of the strenuous hike, my nerves got the best of me the last .5 miles to the summit. It was a hike I never thought I’d be able to do, mainly physically. With that being said, I resolve to prove myself wrong yet again, and climb at least one of the 4,000 foot mountains in NH this year.
Thyago Ferreira
Professional: Being a developer it’s hard to talk about work resolutions that don’t involve some kind of coding right? I believe a great part of this career involves keeping ourselves current with some of the new technologies available. That being said, two technologies I will mainly be focusing on this year are Drupal and Node.js.
Drupal is one of the main frameworks we use here at Commonplaces and that in itself is enough reason for me to become even more proficient at it. Also, it is a very robust and flexible system for building dynamic and secure websites, which makes it ideal for a web developer to have in his toolbox.
Node.js is a relatively new framework that has been gaining a lot of popularity and praise. It is based on the V8 engine of Google and allows us to build server-side web-apps based on javascript. If you didn’t understand that don’t worry, what matters is that it is really fast, really well written and maintained and will probably be around for a long time. All that makes it another great tool to add to my toolbox.
Personal: I have always enjoyed music. When I was a little 4 year old kid (yes, I was once little), I took some years of piano classes which I really loved. After we moved from Curitiba to São Paulo (I was 7 then), I actually stopped taking classes. This year I will pick up from where I left off and evolve as a piano player. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have reached the same level of expertise I was at 20 years ago :)
Giovani Freitas
Professional: Learn and teach new stuff, upgrade my skills.
Personal: Trust in God how I never did, and really take care of my health.
John Nycz
Professional: Build 5 sites using Drupal 8.
Personal: To be more forward when something is bothersome.