The ultimate goal is to see what I learned over a year so I can better appreciate the progress I made, rather than only base my retrospective on feelings. It might also be useful to find what I learned but can't put the name on it, or find links to interesting things I found several months ago.
To help staying focused, I decided to fix goals and rewards. The first reward is on January 1st if I haven't skipped a single day from when I started.
What did you use to set your blog up (language/framework/web-builder)? How long did it take you? It looks nice.
- Launch the webapp that I'm working on. I plan to do it in January.
- Be mindful, especially of how I spend my day. I made https://crushentropy.com/ to make this easier. It has been working out great. I can see that my productivity has gone up, my attention isn't scattered, and I feel more content by the end of each day. I'll do more of this in 2018 and add more related habits and routines.
- I read 33+ books so far this year: https://kirubakaran.com/bookshelf/ This is my current personal best and I'll try to beat this in 2018. Most of the time for this came from cutting back on Hacker News and Reddit, which don't relax me as well as reading a book for 30min does.
- I couldn't travel as much as I wanted to in 2017. I plan to compensate for this in 2018 ;-) I also plan to hike, snowboard, and play racquetball more than I did in 2017.
Two years ago the word was “space”. I made more room in my life for growth and change that year.
This year the word was “presence”. I went on quite a personal development journey and being more present, particularly with my emotions and physical body, was definitely a strong element of that journey.
For next year I’m thinking of breaking my rule and having two words, because it feels like they will work best together: “patience” and “flow”.
I’m curious if anyone else can think of a word that seems to be calling to them this coming year.
Or maybe I'm not understanding the terms the right way as I'm not a native English speaker and may put concepts and meanings from my native language into these terms.
Also things inimical to slow are usually bad: social media (esp twitter), most politics / religious debates, advertising, tv and radio, etc ...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)
Edit: things that slow me down the most are classical music + jazz (mostly piano or guitar solos) and mathematics.
2. Play my electric guitar for an hour at least every other day.
3. Put $1000 a month away in my savings account.
4. Learn to implement some basic computer science algorithms in JavaScript. I don’t know how to do binary trees or hash tables and I’d like to be able to teach them at the Javascript fundamentals meetup I run once a month.
I don't want to assume your financial goals but you might want to talk to a financial planner before just sticking it in a savings account. Unless this is a repository for cash you need short term and with immediate access this is the worst place to put it.
2 activities that helped me greatly. Once you read and solve enough problems, then you will start noticing patterns while understanding their purpose.
Best of luck in your front end journey!
Beyond that, I would suggest learning how to take a psd website design and turn it into HTML. This is a great skills to have. Adding functionality on top of the HTML with react or angular is easy once you know how to break a website down into digestible pieces.
That being said, it is your resolution. I'm not trying to force you into anything. Just giving advice from my experience.
You can also just drop a single CDN URL into your web page without worrying about a JS dev environment, which is not simple to set up these days. That stuff is useful eventually, but I think it's distracting at first and obscures the fundamentals of how the web works.
I'd recommend learning VueJs -- It works well with laravel, not sure what backend you've worked with but I'm sure you can plugin any.
It has a LOT of articles/support online. There's a discord chat for more help. Learn the basics of jquery for sure (I still use it a ton) but something like Vuejs or even React would beef up your resume quite a bit.
I tried my hand at React, it's doable, and I like it for a prototype, but I'm going to try Vue.js next because it's supposed to be much easier.
Angular is supposed to be easier for people coming from the backend.
In any case, frontend development is very frustrating (at least for me), a lot work for little gains sometimes.
Due to a personal project I've been quite obsessed with Google Page Speed lately and this could be the 2nd website I've come across in the wild to have a 100/100. Shoutouts to https://principles.design/ being the first one.
I decided arbitrarily to make every post self-contained inside a single HTTP request, and it's nice to see this single decision is already 99% of the job.
I've found that as your leadership/management scope increases, there just isn't enough of yourself to tackle all the big/complex technical problems. You can't scale as a person. At first you try to throw technology at the problem, and then process. Finally you realize that the basic building block you need to work with is the person. Get that right and everything else will fall into place. Only problem: coming from an engineering background, this doesn't come naturally to me. So I plan to devote the coming year to master that aspect.
... soda, red meat, ice cream
... alcohol/cigarettes (even though I don't drink or smoke often anyway, there is just no good reason to do them at all)
... sleeping in on weekends
... computer for first and last 60 minutes of the day
Yes:
- Meditate >10 min/day
- Exercise >5 days/wk
- Run 3-4 day/wk
- Better-learn and practice good nutrition
- Work >80 hours per week (job + take action on personal startup project)
- Write (morning): My definite goal and detailed plan as per rules of "Think and Grow Rich"
- Write (morning): Anything of importance that may come to mind (and/or possible subconscious breakthroughs from sleep)
- Write (night): What I learned/did that day
- Write (night): the next day's 3 major tasks
But seriously, nothing major. I just want to incrementally improve my writing, coding and health and reading.
For starters, I'm in the middle of a complete blog rewrite (running away from WordPress), using: Hugo and Bulma.
I'm also upgrading my fullstack tech-stack to: Elixir, Phoenix, Vue.js, Ansible. Used to do: Ruby, Rails, Angular.
Latest release: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/12/22.html
A few people have asked me what it is, and I answered with some links and comments here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lsajn/oil_shell_03_...
tl;dr It's a bash-compatible shell that treats shell as a real programming language.
- read 2 books a month, I hit my goal of 1 book/month this year!
- become more present and mindful
- more physical exercise!
Also stop visiting /r/conspiracy and /r/collapse. It has taken a toll on my mental health and always puts me in pessimistic mood.
That, and keeping a journal of some kind.
Anyway I'd highly recommend it, it's not only cathartic in the moment but it's also a lot of fun to be able to look back on ten years of it. What a different person I was 10 years ago!
I always try and do daily-notes and end up getting demotivated after missing a few days... that and all my notes ending up as a stream-of-conciousness...
Will try that system out!
Oh man I feel this one. My backups are just dumps and my photos are totally un-maintainable. I would also like to figure out an easy phone/photo backup scheme where I don't have to import my photos once a month and then copy them to my harddrive. That's how my photos got in such a mess in the first place.
These changes (plus others that I had already made within the last year or two) have left me feeling the healthiest that I have felt in years, both mentally and physically. I feel so much less anxious and more in control of my life, my asthma no longer troubles me and I have lost ten pounds.
I will start drinking daily and become an alcoholic, want to see how far can I go while still functioning in society. The moment my drinking becomes too much, I will just quit society and disappear.
To show I mean business, I started today.
For 2018, I plan on branching out into new hobbies. I'm in danger of becoming a one dimensional person. I think about code most of my waking hours and most of my friends are engineers too. I plan on picking up biking, taking dance classes, or improv classes to meet new people.
1. No sugar foods in Jan/Feb 2018 (and limited sugar afterwards; one dessert per week?)
2. Exercise for 10 minutes, 6 times/week
3. Medidate for 10 minutes, 6 times/week
4. Write a journal for 10 minutes, 6 times/week
5. Walk for 60 minutes, in the morning, 3 times/week
6. Eat well
7. Sleep well (at least 7 hours/night, possibly 8 - 6 times/week)
8. Every month, write a summary of the month just passed.
In past years I've had very measurable goals and have generally achieved them; things like "have a conversation in japanese with someone in japan" or "get a new job".
In early 2017 I set these very specific goals that all revolved around some kind of measured productivity: Learning, doing, making. Then, (my theory is it's because I was on vacation at the time, feeling rested), I set and almost immediately _increased_ the expected output. Memorize a word a day in German? No problem! That's only 365 words...let's ramp that up to, say, five words a day? I can do that with mnemonics...
Well, I gave up on that goal within 10 days, after returning to my normal hectic life. I couldn't even let myself dial it back; I had to quit it entirely (so idealistic, so brittle an approach).
Fortunately, I had also calendared monthly check-ins on my resolutions. I analyzed my progress and realized:
- I should just trust myself to make up little goals as I go along. My interests changed enough throughout the year that a few single, hard commitments were more like a distraction from my normal, fluid mode.
- I achieve a _lot_ even excluding any resolutions. I decided to track my accomplishments starting this year (and backfill previous years as best I could remember) in a milestones.txt file. So in 2017 I finished 10+ different personal web projects, completed my 15+ year-delayed university bachelor's degree, started a new business, became an Extra class ham radio operator after starting in the hobby 2 months previous, bought crypto for the first time, learned to use a transceiver and had my first QSOs, got into AMSAT and (attempted to communicate with the pileup that is) Fox-1B, downloaded Russian SSTV images from the ISS, invested in individual stocks for the first time, became a certified handwriting analyst, joined the National Space Society, and finished two other certifications. So with all this, exactly why did I think I needed any new year's resolutions?
- Any resolutions I have should probably be general directions. This will hopefully prompt me to be more flexible and make needed course corrections along the way, rather than heading toward some fixed point.
Finally, the huge outcome for me was realizing that all of this productivity results in higher anxiety and higher chances for depression (just based on my journals). So I pay a price for achievement. It should be obvious, perhaps, but like a moron I just thought that to achieve big things meant to become happy. A risky thought! There's much more to it.
A TED talk by BJ Fogg on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKUJxjn-R8
• In 2014 my headline resolution was "have a pint in all 48 ceremonial counties of England"
• In 2016 it was "go/be abroad at least once each month" ️
• In 2017, "be under 90kg on Dec 1st, or drink no alcohol in 2018" ️ (phew!)
For 2018 it's "do something 'cultural' in every borough of London".
This is such a dramatic departure from my experience as an American. I'm almost 30 and have left the country once.
Get back to drawing something every day. Preferably the big comics projects. But anything is far better than nothing.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-health-benefits-of-i...
I feel much of the difficulties that I face in life are due to not getting enough sleep. Sleep deprivation has made me less productive, less healthy, and most importantly, less happy.
Spend way more time outdoors, especially in the mountains.
Start posting regularly to my blog.
Learn a bit of Rust.
More cooking
Less apps on phone
More foosball
Less angst (jealousy)
More sharing (Polyamory)
Less work
More toying with locks (lockpicking)
Less flying
More camping
Less beer
More wine
Be less frugal
Support more people with (financial) needs
Weed out the car collection
Do one or two plastic surgeries
Less coding
Collect more art
Less different accounts
More krav maga
Less phones on me
More using different languages
Correct a wrong
- exercise 10 mins every day.
- reduce sugar intake to 1 tbsp/day
- start a blog
- generate 10k in profits with saas.
- learn swimming
Despite being already 30 years old...