2009: I graduated from the 'Graphic Design' program in college and my first goal was to be hired as an employee to do in-house design for a company. I wasn't as interested in joining an agency (that did design for clients).
2010: I ended up in design agencies, doing a ton of branding, web design, web development, print design, and advertising.
2011: Eventually a life situation forced my hand out of that job (and city) and I found myself instantly freelancing - trying to get hired to do whatever somebody would hire me to do.
2012-2013: There's a huge market out there for web-related work, and I found over time that 100% of my incoming design clients were all mostly focused on web stuff, so sometime around 2012-2013 I made a conscious choice to limit the work I do to just web development, specifically frontend, and began working on a specialty of 'responsive layout'.
2014-2017: I had been trying to pick up some JavaScript ability as I was developing my frontend skillset, but from 2014-> it became clear to me that an inability to do JavaScript could be a threat to my work. Since 2015 I've 'doubled-down' on my choice of "Design->Web Dev->Frontend->Responsive Layout", and I'm pushing the throttle as far as it can go. I'm focused on learning JavaScript, especially as it relates to HTML and CSS and can be used to support layout and styling.
2018? We'll see where this takes me :D