John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

My Developer Plans for 2011

Originally published on 1/29/2011

I may not get to everything on this list, but that’s ok. It is good to have a gameplan. I’ll likely even add some things as the year goes on.

There is a definite trend in my goals, and that is to open up my skillset, moving away from specializing in Flash. My ultimate goal is to be as thoroughly well rounded in interactive development as possible. I still plan on using flash for many things, such as games, complex animation and various other content when appropriate. ActionScript remains my favorite language to work in. However, the world of web standards and html5 has its own allure, and I do not want to be late to that party.

  • Improve my HTML+CSS+JS
  • Develop my own library of HTML5 tools and templates (like the one I have for Flash)
  • Do more back end development
  • Dive in to Drupal
  • Build more mobile apps
  • Explore doing Flash game development
  • Give some presentations