2. I switched to from Linux to macOS on the desktop in ~2007. I am now back to Linux on my home machine. I decided to stop complaining about bugs/problems and instead try to report every bug/problem that I encounter, when possible with a minimal test case, and a patch. So far, I have reported a small number of GNOME bugs and I hope to complain less and report/fix more in 2018. I am looking forward to this, because it benefits me and may help other people.
3. I work in a computational linguistics department and have teaching duties. Next semester, I will be teaching a 'low-level natural language processing' course using Rust. I have been using (and like) Rust for NLP-related projects, so the course will be fun. Also, I am looking forward to see to see how much students will like Rust.
4. Meditating more. I used to meditate a lot, including doing retreats. With a young child, it will be difficult to do full retreats, but it would be great to sit 10-15 minutes per day again.
5. Recently, an indoor climbing center opened close to us. My wife is planning to do a course, so that we can climb together as a family. (I used to climb ~twice a week for 5 years.)
Make: finish a side project I'm working on. After that, start a new project with a completion time of, say, about four months with the hope that some will become successful or provide unexpected indirect value such as getting to know interesting people etc.
Learn: continually learn stuff so that I cover roughly undergraduate understanding of all of the major branches of science: physics, biology, economics, chemistry, etc. For fun and because it's rewarding and useful to understand the fundamentals of a wide range of fields. Useful because when there's some specialized area of interest, understanding the fundamentals makes it possible to learn about it relatively quickly.
Fun: travel more, maybe try LSD :)
Other than that, get a significant raise and/or start looking for a much better paying job. The job market in my country is extremely favourable for employees right now, so I'm basically wasting a big opportunity out of fear of change. Also, slack less in work (that's the reason I haven't asked for a raise yet).
I typically assign myself two large projects a year to delve deep into to topics I'm ignorant in, so I'm going to attempt to build two low-level networking services. One is a TOR router and the other is a userland TCP/IP stack--I'm crazy excited to send a successful request to google.
I have a few non-trivial open source projects (a torrent tracker and a distributed key-value store) and two small side-businesses (one of which is built in Elixir + Phoenix and the other went under a rewrite to that stack). Showing that I can ship products tends to get me in the door, but a combination of luck, personality, and technical know-how moves me forward in the interview process.
Also, starting my first real job.
However by nature I am very introverted. Not socially anxious, just I get extremely tired around people, and in general can't hold a conversation about any non-tech topic. Also I am a cold/distant person with relative little emotions, not sure why. The couple of friends I had were similar to me, and we can be comfortably cold together. However I work with very warm and caring people from diverse backgrounds, and recognize that I love the qualities they posses. Rather then be happy with who I am, I figured it must be possible to 'train' emotions, so that I become an overall more positive person.
However as a result I now attend around at least 1 social event a week, which goes ok. But sometimes if there are multiple events planned close to each other, my sociability drops off a cliff, but I have trouble recognizing when it happens. Not sure if I should dial back and be happy with the progress I made, or keep going and try to focus on breaking this sociability wall I am hitting.
Larger goals for the year include establishing a stronger financial base, learning to weld (and perhaps getting my certification), to cook the vast majority of my meals at home, and finally breaking the habit of biting my fingernails, which has plagued me since I could talk.
Oh, and go to Yosemite again. I've wanted to go back for years, ever since I went there as a child on a family vacation.
So I have a very long list of things to do :
- finish furnish my apartment so it starts feeling like home.
- start working out
- take cooking lessons
- volunteering : the gap between the poor and rich leaves a sour taste when you arrive here. It also exists in my origin country (France) but it is just so much worse here.
- I am not really looking forward to anything tech related. Tech work starts looking like more of the same to be honest.
Smuggling is just free trade without waiting for your government to negotiate free trade agreements.
If it's food, like my grandmother smuggling cheese and rice across borders to feed her family, i'm 101% happy to support free markets.
If it's corporation money and weapons whom do you think gets a bribe? Spoiler: the government officials you despise.
2. Deploy my SAAS project on AWS. I've spent last few months learning how to script out stacks in AWS and run an ECS cluster. Just need to wrap this up.
There is a never-ending supply of things I'm looking forward to do on any given day :)
At the same time, I'm establishing a business entity on the side. The goal for this entity is to use my extra time and focus my learning in a way that generates income. I initially plan to do part-time consulting and I have a client lined up, but long term my goal is to develop a stable income working on open source software in areas where I'm interested.
If I am shrewd and lucky this will become my primary source of income.
Taking time to study some beautiful theory that is also applicable to my interests in programming: category theory, logic, and proof systems.
Continuing my daily work with fun technologies like Nix, Haskell, Ethereum, Racket, and so on.
Going away for a work retreat with some remote colleagues.
I'm starting to feel like I've been blackballed.
My current plan is to read a lot of books and focus on my writing skills. Other goal is to keep my tech chops up to date (so I can easily move back if I don't like this role).
* Try and buy no new books until I read all the unread ones I already have.
2. Launching my own blog to teach others how to make an income from crypto currencies automatically like I do.
3. Spending way more time outdoors and on adventures.
4. Improving my relationship skills.
5. Finishing my SaaS side project and launching it.