Ask HN: Your goals for 2011 | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Your goals for 2011

15 pointsniico11 comments

What are your goals before the end of the world (?)

Continue to be a part of a great team building a great product.

It's cheesy, sure, but it's very important to me. I love my job and see a great future for the company I work at. However, I can only continue committing 100% if I work with great people doing great things.

As such, my goals for 2011 will be encouraging an even better ambiance within our company, encouraging creativity and encouraging to constantly improve.

PS. Another personal goal is to build a foundation for the future for the cricket team I play in (2nds at VRA Cricket, Amsterdam). We won the league last year, but failed to promote in the play-offs.

I'll actually get my (short) film finished 2011 and hopefully in time to take it to Cannes where I'll eat so many hors d'oeuvres. More film nonsense but that's not too relevant for HN!

I'm also planning on building a few side projects this year and using them to learn python & node which I hope will help me smash the £20k barrier :) I also have an iPhone game idea that I will try and bash out (have held o to this idea since I had my Amiga and its time has come again).

And a holiday. I haven't a real, proper, more-than-2-days holiday in a decade. That will be happening!

While I think new years resolutions are somewhat cliche, I do think there is some value in evaluating your life trends periodically and finding places you've been over and/or under investing. The holidays are a time when a lot of folks do that.

My shortlist:

- Focus better. Become more efficient and either automate or delegate tasks that do not have the ROI on my time.

- Make better use of my personal time. I'd love to learn the guitar. Volunteer more. Learn to meditate.

- Stay in shape and make better food decisions. Of course this is a common one for many people.

- Spend more time with family.

How about you, OP?

Get minesweeper.el into Emacs. Whether or not that occurs, start contributing to Emacs.

Given that minesweeper.el is winding down (I'm just working on mature optimization at this point), come up with one decent-sized useful project to hack on. Of course, I've said before that I thought it was almost done.

Learn Haskell and Forth. At least, become somewhat fluent.

Keep coding Lisp every day. My streak continues since July; let's see how long this can go for. How will learning new languages interact with this? I'm not really sure.

My main goal will be to Get AT LEAST ONE PAYING CUSTOMERS FOR ALL MY APPS. Secondary goals include;

- Complete my courses and pass all its exams.

- Learn Ruby on Rails and build 3 more apps with it.

It might make more sense to try and get more paying users for a small amount of apps, than more apps for a small amount of users.

@noachc. Ya, that's true. Right now, I only have 2 apps existing, hope to increase the portfolio to 5 apps.

> While I think new years resolutions are somewhat cliche,

same. having said that, i only have to primary (read: realistic) ones:

- launch the paid version(s) of my pet project and start spending actual money to acquire users.

- design a better workout/diet program, one that actually has the ability to degrade gracefully depending on my schedule and travel, and stick to it.

What are your goals before the end of the world (?)

If I thought the world were actually ending, I would have completely different goals than I actually have (and they would sound rather Bacchanalian).

My goal is to continue the 23% average monthly revenue growth in 2011 that I had in 2010. Then my side project revenue should match what I earn at my day job.

Launch a product every month.

And, if I'm lucky, figure out how to support each one.

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