Reflections on 2020 and Earlier

I can’t recall exactly why I didn’t bother write a goal post (pun?) last year, but let’s ignore that for now. I’m back in action! Let’s start with some reflections:

• Berlin has now been my home for 3 years. This is the longest I’ve lived somewhere outside of my home city since Calgary (over 11 years ago)! I’m loving my home and my life here so I don’t see myself moving again anytime soon. Here’s a view of my happy place in my flat (Meine Wohnung).

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Reflections on 2018

This will be easy because I didn’t set any goals last year! It felt great to take a break from goal setting because 2018 was a big year of transition. I moved yet again and I started a new role at work. I then found that it didn’t fit me and I finally had some self awareness to reach out for help and was able to switch roles again to something that suits me at this moment in time.

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Reflections on 2017

• Perform 1 pull up - This didn’t go so well. I’m now the heaviest that I’ve ever been (95kg). My psoriasis (scalp) has become really annoying and gets worse when I exercise. So 2017 wasn’t a good year for my health. It’s very clear that I don’t handle disruption of my routine very well. Below is a graph of my workouts:

Only 1 or 2 of those gaps was related to illness; most of them were due to travel (work and play). The last few months was me being preoccupied with my move to Berlin (yet another excuse).

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2016 was the first time I accomplished my goal!

Reflections on 2016

• Write in a Journal - This one I am marking as a success. Here are the (manually) calculated stats:

Jan 9
Feb 3
Mar 12
Apr 9
May 15
Jun 9
Jul 13
Aug 14
Sep 12
Oct 14
Nov 9
Dec 12

I wrote 143 journal entries over the course of 2016. After counting them all up there are far fewer than I thought, but the frequency is actually more consistent than I thought. I had imagined I had more months that only had a couple entries. I see this as my first step in writing more and hopefully bringing it to this website. Seeing that my journalling actually increased by the end of the year makes me really happy. I’m going to continue this in 2017 for sure.

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This post almost didn’t happen. 2015 holds a lot of dead-air from me in the blogging world, but I’m so compelled by my routines that I felt that I had to do it! Honouring a self-made routine/tradition is my achilles heel and my biggest strength at the same time.

Reflections on 2015

2015 wasn’t a good year for sticking to my goals, but I still learned a lot on the way:

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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!

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I was tempted to not write this post. My motivations are changing a bit and growing strong technically isn’t one of my top priorities nowadays.

Reflections on 2013

Last year was very interesting for me. It’s the first time I didn’t really have a home. I’ve split my time between India, United States, and South Africa, (ok, I was in Toronto for a few weeks too). During that time I’ve reflected a lot (probably too much). My work was split between training new software developers and developing tools to deploy the largest and most complex distributed system I’ve ever worked on.

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2012 started off interesting because I was on on an iOS/ruby project. Nearly everything was new to me, but I liked how my past experiences with other technology stacks were still relevant. Even though I didn’t know the languages very well the patterns I’ve seen before still applied.

The last quarter of the year was spent teaching new software developers in India, which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career! It has definitely influenced my goals for 2013.

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An interesting thing about 2011 is that my resolutions from earlier became quite prominent. Given that 8 months of 2011 were spent on a large account with less technical focus, I’m amazed at some of the technical things that I’ve done.

Reflections on 2011 and carry over from 2010:

• Mouseless Computing (2010) - I think the practice is paying off as a colleague of mine told me “You make Windows fly!”, and he’s a savvy keyboard only Mac OSX user.
• OSS participation (2010) - I started the following projects:
  • Pester - I’ve blogged about it and it’s getting some traction out there in the wild. It’s a spec based testing framework for Powershell. The first implementation was written on a hung-over new years day!
  • yari - A Windows ruby version manager. Currently being used by a very large client. I wrote this on a whim, because I thought I could do better than what was previously implemented. Turned out the client liked this a lot more and decided to adopt it right away.
  • YDeliver - The beginnings of a Continuous Delivery framework for .Net projects.
  • Misc - Submitted a patch to OpenMRS, a bug report to Puppet, directory additions to PSGet
• Learn VIM (2011) - This went really well. I’m definitely no expert at this point but I’m continuoully trying to learn new things. I’ve setup a github project for my vimfiles which is a fun way to share my tweaks.
• Develop an Android App (2011) - Nope, didn’t do anything here. It’s actually dropped off my radar as it’s not really something I’m interested in anymore
• Learn a server provisioning automation tool (2011) - I barely get a passing grade on this one. I’ve yet to use any of these tools (chef, puppet, etc…) on a project. In my spare time I’ve tried them out and understand the gist of how they work. I do question how necessary they are though. Unless you’re doing massive scaling it seems like they just add extra overhead for simple scenarios.
• Move this blog (2011) - This will be my last post on this blog engine. I’ve currently setup Octopress and have my new blog ready on github. I just have the task of migrating over all posts (and deleting some). I have more to say about Octopress soon.

Development Goals for 2012:

2012 is going to be different for me development wise. I’m finding myself less focused on technical issues and more on system, culture, and people goals. I’m striving to become more of a leader (clear sign of post-technical syndrome) and I think that’s reflected in my resolutions for this year.

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Looking back at 2010 I can’t say I did a good job of following through with my resolutions, but I believe I have a valid excuse! For the last 12 months I’ve been working more as a build/release specialist than a software developer. Anyways, here’s a rundown of what I didn’t accomplish last year:

• Test Driven Design - I barely coded at all so that was a total flop. I also believe that this is something that’s hard to do on your own. This discipline really needs a pair in order to stay on track.
• Mouseless Computing - This is probably my most successful resolution. I’m still no keyboard ninja, but I’ve improved over last year and even wrote a fun negative re-inforcement application.
• OSS Participation - I’m going to defer this to this year as I have a couple things planned for the near future.
• Complete small project in different dev stack - Total flop. I attempted to do something in Rails and I couldn’t get going. I think I’ve been in the .Net world for too long. New frameworks completely twist the way I do things and I find I’m not good at learning the conventions of these new technologies.

Development Goals for 2011:

Learn VIM (building my lightsaber)

I’ve tried to find the perfect editor for ages. I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that I’m going to be a perpetual generalist. Sometimes I find myself working on all sorts of OS’s (Ubuntu, Win7, Mac OSX), and I don’t want to learn the best editor for each (GEdit, Notepad++, TextMate). VIM works on all of them so why not learn that? Historically VIM has been labelled as a difficult but powerful editor and with good reason. I’m writing this post in VIM and discovering how much learning I have to do to get to the level of VIM experts.

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I’ve never made any New Years resolutions before. This year I’m going to break that trend simply to create a checklist of tasks to keep me on track. I easily get distracted, but having to check things off a list is a sure way for me to stay focused.

Not wanting to over do it, I made goals that are easily attainable. Hopefully upon completion I’ll get more ambitious the next time around.

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