My Resolutions For 2015
This has become a bit of a tradition for me so I can’t quite writing these now. This one will be a bit different than the previous ones though. Normally these posts are my technical resolutions. I’m not that ambitious anymore when it comes to technical learning so I’ve dropped that from the title. Even though I tend to despise meaningless dates, I look at resolutions as one large pomodoro. So the tradition lives on!
Reflections on 2014
Going on a career break sort of twisted everything around in 2014. Still, it was interesting to see how I did:
- Increase Signal to Noise Ration - I’m only following 118 people on Twitter now as opposed to 627, but my “friend” count on FaceBook went up to 507 from 480. Considering that Twitter is where most of the noise comes from, I think I succeeded in this goal.
- Learn Docker - I’ve yet to run the docker CLI, so didn’t go far with this. I’m not terribly interested in it now as my frustration with tech is still there. 2015 may be a success if I still don’t touch docker.
- Do Meaningful Work - Does quitting my job and traveling the world for 9 months count as success? It does to me so I think I slayed this resolution! I’m also getting back into the workforce with a company that is in a domain I care about and I’ve gotten the opportunity to be on the board of advisors for an interesting clean energy start up.
Goals for 2015:
I think the time off has given me a new perspective. These goals are more about looking at myself externally and figuring out what kind of design changes to I want to make on myself.
Brew Beer
Given that I want to look into the business of beer, it would help if I’ve actually brewed some. I believe brewing 10 batches is a reasonable goal. If I can’t do this, then I can safely drop the idea of building a beer related business in the future. I enjoy publishing my chai experiments and I’ll do the same thing with my beer brewing. Will probably publish them on this blog for now.
Progress: 0 batches brewed
Nurture a Healthy Habit
Over the last 15 years of my life I’ve ridden a health rollercoaster. I can’t recall any year where I didn’t go off the routine and regress to my old unhealthy habits. This year I’m aiming to be more proactive around my habits and plan a bit better when I can see potential for a habit to break (eg: when traveling, or a busy period). My goal is run at least 10 times every month. Be sure to verify my results on Strava. I am training for a half marathon but this is very typical of my health ambitions. Do something big, and then stop.
January: 19 runs February: 13 runs March: 6 runs (strained hamstring injury) April: May: June: July: August: September: October: November: December:
Think More Critically
This could be due to having a lot of time to consume too much media over the last year, but I feel that I should be more thoughtful in my communication and critical of my messages. It’s easy to type out a pithy tweet skipping a load of context. When being critical I will do due dilligence in citing research when trying to impose my ideas, or at least be more transparent in pointing out how much is anecdotal. This one is a tougher one to measure. The only thing I can think of is comparing the number of tweets over the course of the years, and having source lists in all my blog posts (or stating the source are my own observations and are completely theoretical).
Summary
When reading my 2014 post I can tell that I was getting jaded about the IT industry. It looks like I’m still a bit jaded, but this time I’m steering the ship away from IT a bit. Let’s see what these new waters are like.
This post took 2 pomodoros to complete