New Year’s Resolutions to Inspire You to Become a Better Developer

2016 has been an exciting year for programming. We saw official releases of Angular 2, Vue.js 2.0, and Android Nougat. GraphQL became production ready (and is being used by GitHub!) There was also a lot of development in technologies like VR, chatbots, and AI — who wouldn't want Morgan Freeman to make them toast?

With the arrival of the New Year, we asked CTOs and developers to reflect on this past year and to share their personal resolutions for 2017. We hope these resolutions will inspire you to set your own goals to become a better developer.

"It's an amazing time to be a developer. With the rise of code camps, online tutorials, and mentorship programs, motivated people have more access to help and tutelage than ever before! I'm setting a personal goal in 2017 to not only mentor more people but also to find a mentor for myself. I'm going to be a better developer!"
—Scott Hanselman, Microsoft, hanselman.com

We all know that technology is constantly evolving. Next year, I’d like to set aside more time to learn about new emerging technologies. I’m personally most interested in learning more about machine learning and how I can potentially build my own Morgan Freeman-less Jarvis in the near future!
—Weiting Liu, Founder & CEO of Codementor

"My New Year's resolution is to do a better job of breaking big, nebulous technical goals into small, easily achievable projects. I'd rather work on a series of related but separate small projects than one monolithic project that takes up most of the year. Or to put this another way: I want to ship code faster."
—Tyler King, Co-Founder of Less Annoying CRM

"Just as even the most elite athlete makes progress week after week through consistent, incremental effort, my New Year's resolution is to implement smaller, more frequent releases that improve our product with every update -- even if that just means fixing a few bugs a week."
—Nidhi Kulkarni, Founder & CTO of Spitfire Athlete

"My New Year's resolution is to move our production floor from inventing a 'new wheel' every time to becoming a group focused on growing our company through efficiencies."
—Gene Bernier, Co-Founder & CTO of Cheeky Monkey Media

"In the New Year, I'm focussed on strengthening our platform to provide more value and capabilities to our customers. I'm also enthusiastic about building an even stronger engineering team, by empowering our existing employees and investing in talent acquisition and development."
—Raif Barbaros, CTO & VP of Engineering at Influitive

"Besides high-speed product development, for the new year, we also want to focus on code quality. This will help code maintainability once the feature has shipped, and new additions to the team will be able to make their first commit to production sooner."
—Gage Tseng, Director of Product at Codementor

"In 2017, I resolve to launch an AI that replaces tedious human tasks. AI is already replacing work that humans used to do. This has been commonplace since computers proliferated the workforce. However, this is more profound now than it was before. AI will replace digital communications on your phone and computers. Instead of talking to customer support or sales people, you will talk with customer support and sales robots. I have started working on this."
—Stephen Blum, CTO of PubNub

"My New Year's resolution is to embrace the cloud. Services such as Google App Engine and Amazon Lambda allow you to run code at scale without spinning up new servers. It takes effort to get out of the more traditional mindset of running your own servers, but I think that in the right situations it can really pay off."
—Joe Papperello, Co-Founder & CTO of BugReplay

"In the New Year, one of our dev team goals is to start using AI for marketing. We want to use and train an AI library like TensorFlow to help us with outreach, SEO and social media marketing. We think this will drastically speed up our efforts as long as we hook into the right APIs."
—Max Page, Technical Founder of Coupon Hippo

What are Your Resolutions?

We've seen what CTOs and influential developers will be working on next year. Do you have similar goals for the new year? We'd love to hear what resolutions you've made for the New Year! Let us know below 😄

Don't see your favorite developer on this list? Let us know in the comments. We'd love to include their resolution!