What are your goals for 2023? I’m particular, what would you like to lean? What skills do you want to develop?
My life currently is 90% consumption, be it media, news, tv shows, movies, food, etc. I feel like a trash can. Not that majority of the stuff i consume is trash, but that the stuff i consume trashes me. I only do stuff that i need to, sometimes not even that because i'm too occupied consuming.
My goal is to lower my "I/O" and to choose more wisely what should take up my "bandwidth". And at the same time to free some "disk"-/brain-space.
Basically reducing screen time and finding activities that can be done without electronics and maybe give me some energy back instead of draining my "battery".
The problem is my only real interest is programming, sysadmin stuff or basically anything that has something to do with creating/doing something on something that has a processor in it.
Going to be interesting to develop skills outside of my usual comfort zone but it is long due.
If I could make a bolt from a piece of steel, I'd be one happy camper. Yeah yeah I can youtube all day long. I just want to learn something in real time from a person.
I'd love a later-in-life university that would have courses that let you take that hero's journey.
It’s been amazing to discover that I can throw up a LoRa network, get some controllers sensing and actuating, talk to them and observe them from the web, run their data through a message broker, etc. and have this little ecosystem of hardware doing things I want or need. I’ve just started piping some of the data online so I can observe and interact while on vacation in the future.
I’ve always just bought stuff that kind of does what I need, had a vague understanding of how it works, and left it at that. Now I can build a lot of things I need from components, and it’s sometimes even cheaper! I understand so much more about how things work. It’s really cool to be able to say I actually know what’s happening in a Bluetooth speaker and that I could (rudimentarily) build one from a Bluetooth-capable microcontroller. From code to power source to amplifier and wiring up speakers, I actually get it! Sure it would look and sound awful, but to me it’s amazing.
I’ve got a hydroponic garden that’s very well automated (dosing pumps for nutrients and pH levels, light schedules, pump schedules, heaps of environmental sensors, sensor calibration routines, etc), a mushroom fruiting chamber (way dumber than the hydroponic system), weather station, and I’d like to start getting into the basics of robotics next. An IK algorithm would be very gratifying to implement.
It’s so cool to use programming to make real things that interact with the world. I learn so many new skills, get better at programming, and actually make useful stuff. I haven’t been so excited about a new skill in a long time.
Part of me wonders if I might need more education to pursue a new branch in my career, but another part of me is pretty sure I don’t have any special talents and it’s probably best left as a hobby.
It’s not like I’d have the time or energy in the hours between my full-time job to develop my skills in any meaningful way, anyway. Most days I don’t even have the brainpower to cook myself dinner in the evening, let alone learn something new. Some days I get home and go straight to bed. And I still have trouble getting out of it ten hours later.
I guess I’m wasting my time answering a question that’s not for me. I’m long past having hobbies and ambitions. I’ve “grown up”, some might say. This “real world” really is as bleak as it looked like it would be to 17-year-old me. Funny to think, even all those years ago I thought I was being a moody teenager and that soon enough I’d be proven wrong and snap out of it. Still waiting. It Gets Better Soon™, right? Or is this really all there is?
Oh well. Life goes on.
Secondly, I like to improve my English, which proves to be complicated when living in a country where it's not the main language. So if anyone would like to chat about Programming, Linux, Stable Diffusion or whatever, hit me up.
More techy stuff:
- learn iOS programming;
- learn more about compiler development;
- FreeBSD;
- Windows from developer’s POV and internals.
Hobby: get better at photographing wild animals. Main obstacle here currently is lack of a fast long lens, but I’m probably going to fix that by the end of 2023. When I get better at it, I want to go on a safari and photograph a couple wild cats: lions, leopards. Alternatively lynxes in Sweden/Estonia and snow leopards in Himalayas. But that’s getting into a much longer plan than just 2023.
In Glasgow and the Highlands maybe. But not in Edinburgh.
Maybe that’s a weird thing to do, but I’m probably going to take private English lessons… while in UK. That’s because I don’t expect people in normal conversations to correct me on a day to day basis, but I’m going to need it nonetheless.
And not a "skill", but something I want to do in 2023 is to continue to lose weight and get more fit, mostly by continuing to do a lot of bike riding and start mixing in some trail running. And eating more plant-based foods and less highly processed foods.
Keeping fit and learning some programming language are great goals, don't get me wrong, but in trying to think about my own goals for 2023 I can't help but thinking "really? Are these really my goals? Running 5k or whatever? When I'm on my deathbed, would I care that I achieved that goal?"
I wish I could come up with something more ambitious and memorable, and was hoping this thread would have some exciting ideas.
Then again, maybe dreamers prefer to remain silent and just work on their goals...
If anything, I’m wondering if I’m not wishing for too much.
I find this community to be one of the few places where people aren’t trying to constantly up sell themselves and that’s refreshing.
On my deathbed I’d probably wish I enjoyed the simple things that this world provided more - laughter, human companionship , raising a child.
Next 1. Complete my journey of learning to code by building and launching 1-2 simple apps in the year. 2. Build a few new businesses that run with low maintenance effort in software, content or a combination.
I'd like to find a way to mix reinforcement learning with traditional AI techniques and perhaps create a game to demonstrate it.
Going at least 3/4 times to the gym a week, studying every day, waking up at a reasonable time, keeping everything clean and eating well.
I don't care if I actually manage to get buffed or excel at all my classes; I just want to end the year knowing that I gave everything; and try to create habits out of these things.
- theory and applied parsing
- graphs and enumerative combinatorics
- some infra/sys (k8s, kafka)
- more fp, prolog, gofai
- more geometry2. To let go off the need to constantly improve something or to constantly chase something.
At first I thought Terraform was the only way to do it, but now that I've used some CFT in AWS, I think they both have their strengths. They don't really overlap each other perfectly. Maybe like 90% overlap but the good stuff is on the periphery. Azure Resource Templates are not bad. Google Cloud Platform seems to be a Terraform shop. So is OpenStack. They all kind of bleed together.
We want to use the kubernetes control plane for a lot of stuff in the near future. If I had time to learn some golang, I think I could break free of writing IaC stuff, and start working on provisioner code that automates IaC.
:)
(Never met him :))
2. Skincare
3. Meditation