Every year I try and look at the state of website development and set some goals to help me expand my skills. I try to make these goals learning technologies that I think can help me do things better/faster but are hard to bill to a specific project/client.

Here are my goals for 2014:

1. Create and maintain a website using Zend Framework 2

This was a goal last year but it just never got off the ground. I'm happy to say that I have an idea and a process down and this is going to be one of my priorities in the coming months. I must say ZF2 is much harder to work with then ZF1 but I'm learning and it seems much more powerful.

2. Create and maintain a website using Grunt

After reading the Automating Front-end Workflow deck that I posted last year, I've become very interested in using Grunt to process my SCSS, JS, and image files. I've started some work on this and hope to have some blog posts shortly on this awesome technology.

3. Unit Testing

Another goal from last year but I've seen the light and now I just need to make it so.

4. Learn how to create sites that "scale out"

This is more of a work goal because we're starting to have a hard time taking down our servers to perform maintenance on them and we want to create a highly available website. We've already run into a couple problems with just porting over our current codebase.