Ask HN: What are your goals for 2023? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your goals for 2023?

54 pointszabana97 comments

Mine are to move abroad for work, pivot from SWD to SRE/Devops and get travel europe by train.

I'll be finishing a very boring, but well paying contract at the end of this year. After that, I'll be taking time off (potentially forever, since I'm already FI) to focus on things I care about:

1. Try out Zig and go back into hobby graphics programming/gamedev.

2. Decrease dopamine chasing, increase focus. I hope to achieve it via treating my work as my fun - i.e. if I'm bored, I should just get back to the IDE or do some research, instead of mindlessly jumping on HN or other news sites. If I'm too tired to focus, I should either go outside or just lay down and rest - instead of my usual routine of using Internet content as a source of pleasure.

3. Lose weight that has crept on me in the past couple years of working full-time.

Gonna be plenty of tech stuff on this thread, so taking a risk and revealing some more personal goals:

- learn to drive then drive to the sea somewhere with my dog

- renovate flat

- start citizenship process

- become fluent in Czech, instead of my current level of "awkward and nervous"

- be as nice online as I am in real life

- rejoin badminton league and start playing football again

Ahoj, are yo an expat living in CZ? :)

Čau, yeah I'm in Brno

* Improve at digital art, and make more handmade illustrations for my website. Transition from drawing representative objects to drawing people doing things.

* Further move my focus away from income generation, and closer to building a public good.

* Cook more, better Indian food

Here are some goals I'll be seeking next year:

- read more. Read a couple of books this year, but I just want more, and more deep reflections on them.

- knowledge base: have more trackability around the stuff I like. So I'm getting into knowledge base management so that I can have pre written ideas and have a more easy path towards some future projects. Having that become a habbit is a goal for me.

- learn react + d3. Being a data scientist, I've always loved the cool data viz projects I've seen around the web, so I'd like to get my feet wet in the world.

- masters degree: I have had as a goal to join a masters program in statistics because it is a discipline I really enjoy studying and feel I can actually enjoy my routine during the 2 years I would be locked into. Now that I have the financial stability to maybe quit work for a while (or have another less demanding type of work), I feel the could be feasable.

- To get better at basketball. I have always loved that sport and it helped me get fit. But I've never been particulary good at it, so I'd like to improve to have more fun at pickup games.

1 earn an income with my passion project https://QuietNearMe.com

2 play more, more humor, more laughs

3 expand social circle, make new friends

Neat project. For what it's worth I want to poke around at it to discover "what kind of places might you recommend near me" to find out if I'm interested but I don't want to sign up without any sense of its value so I just closed the page.

Thanks! And I completely agree, I generally do the same. I don't sign up without a sense of the value.

I put the sign up wall - reluctantly - recently because people are not inclined to suggest their favorite quiet spots. And I need to grow the quiet map to make it liveable for me. Currently its all on my dime & time.

It needs to stay a free platform for users. It's not the affluent that live next to railways, share rooms, can escape to the countryside.

So I put the sign up wall so I at least have the possibility to send an email every once in awhile, to reach out to the interested users. To encourage them to add a quiet spot. I have not send such email since I created it 7 months ago.

I'm not happy with this "solution" but have not found a better way. Would welcome any advice or input.

ps: If you like, I'll send you an entry code.

My daughter has hyperacusis so I love the idea of this project.

Thanks. My dad has it too.

1. Do cool things.

2. Tell people about them.

3. Stay away from any glowing screen unless I'm doing 1 or 2.

E ink displays for the win

Not quite what I had in mind, but that's not a bad idea. E ink displays make for some cool projects.

Simple but wise words. Good luck with achieving them!

- Help my family (new job, education)

- Learn more about software architecture

- Publish on my website the solution to a fantastic 20th-century literary puzzle (https://glthr.com/cj)

My everyday living today is waiting for the war to end.

Electricity cut offs, freezing cold, water shortage, rocket terror and general unpredictability make it harder for me to commit to some sort of a long term plan, much less muster enough energy to do Leetcode style interviewing.

Although, I've started running for an hour per day, which helps with bad mood and suicidal thoughts.

My goals for 2023 and beyond are: survive, connect with people like me, transition, hopefully find a new tech job, get into health/longevity. I believe that logevity is the next big thing.

So sorry to hear. Hang in there. Keep exercising, always a good thing to do. That atrocity will come to an end hopefully soon.

Without any specific order:

- lose weight, get fit

- build a successful side business

- maybe find a new (main) job

- spend more time with my cats

- better work-life balance

- treat myself better

- spend more time with my family (father was diagnosed with dementia last week)

- watch more sunsets

edit: lots of good things in this thread, some more ideas/goals for me

- make a barista course/certification (love making coffee)

- contribute to some piece of FOSS

- support university students in my field through a lecture or otherwise

- Improve my online presence, mostly through some blog posts.

- See if I can squeeze a publication or two out of the stuff we're doing at work.

- Make some more meaningful open source contributions

> - Make some more meaningful open source contributions

What kind of project are you planning on contributing to? I keep telling myself that I should contribute to some Linux desktop project, but the problem I have is that everything seems to just work and I don't run into many issues to fix... :)

Considering something like torchgeo (https://github.com/microsoft/torchgeo), or maybe some geospatial library written in Julia.

> but the problem I have is that everything seems to just work and I don't run into many issues to fix.

May I point you at linux audio? ;-) Getting any type of DAW working in linux without having to do some crazy rewiring with jack would be a godsend.

1. Finish my academic duties (masters degree).

2. Get a job, start a small side business, grow my online presence.

3. Get the hell out of Latin America, this continent is far too violent.

Expressing curiosity regarding your third point: the time zones of Latin America are very friendly to USA work. How does the violence fare in more expat (pricier) locations?

I’m sorry for you that you and your friends(/family) have to deal with an unsafe environment. I’m curious what you mean by violence. I got into a database of potential consultants for a Latin American software company, and I’m open to input regarding the viability of this work life balance as a single male.

If you earn an american salary, by that I mean from an american company and in USD, you'll have no problem living comfortably in an upscale neighborhood i.e. the safest and with lots of amenities. The reason is, not only you are paid in a strong currency (compared to the local ones) but also the quantity is higher.

Now, by violence I mean mostly all things stemming from drug-trafficking (hitmen, kidnappings, racketeering, extortion, carjacking) most commonly found in central america but expanding to southern countries more and more. The safest cities were historically Montevideo in Uruguay and Santiago in Chile, I may be biased but I think Montevideo is still safe and I'm not sure about Santiago, unless you choose to live in the eastern side of the city [0]. EDIT: you may want to factor political instability in your decision. I encourage you to ask other expats about their experience and what they see in the future, they're well-off so they they're lucky to avoid unpleasant experiences the local population has to deal with (plus they can always return to the US). I personally would only live in Chile and Uruguay, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_zone_of_Santiago

Making it through the year without big health and financial setbacks. Enjoying the presence of the people close and dear to me. Play with our dog and cat. Trying to put the finishing touches on some of my personal projects.

Write down all the things I've learned about web dev over the last 25 years.

Not sure what I'll do on January 2nd yet.

1. start beekeeping in spring 2. creating some web apps in spring boot/angular (i'm a full time on premise dev) 3. having fun with wife and daughter :)

I purposefully avoid setting yearly goals, as so much can happen during that time. My real goals can change (and make me feel bad for being so indecisive) or I could pass good opportunities by being too focused on a different goal. What I like is setting a direction or a topic and – in absence of surprise, good or bad – try to follow it. In 2022, it was setting up the processes to run my company as smoothly as possible. For 2023, I want to reach out and experiment. That means getting myself out there to connect with interesting people and maybe find new clients, employees, friends,... The world is a fascinating place and that's the year I want to experience it. Here are some of the goals that go in that general direction:

* Finish the setup of my blog and start publishing posts from my (too long) draft backlog.

* Back in October, I started doing 3-month experiments with my day-to-day life to try different structures and seek personal fulfillment. Thanks to being a freelancer/contractor/consultant, I worked for 6 months at 120% plus the overhead of running my company and at 10% the next 3 months. Neither have much room to construct a meaningful work-life balance: work too much and there is no life, work too little and there is no point. Now that I work between 40 and 80% and it's the most fulfilling life I've had so far. But the lines between work and life are still too fuzzy and I know I can improve both by finding the right structure, hence the experiments.

* Publish some open source utils that I've created to scratch an itch and found no good alternative to – think Home Assistant / IFTTT but for commands on your own computer.

* I work on using technology to bring innovative solutions to SMEs (it won't awe the average HNer though...) and I used to organize hackathons. So I'm thinking about offering summer internships to build a Proof-of-Concept showing the value technology can bring.

I'd like to pivot in the opposite direction as you, from DevOps to software engineering.

I'd like to get more personal project done. I started many this year, but never finished most. (Friends have told me to seek ADHD diagnosis and treatment.)

I find myself wanting to do something entrepreneurial, but I very consistently talk myself out of any ideas I have for for moral/ethical reasons. I'd like to find something that doesn't involve some race to the bottom and also promotes some kind of, idk how to put this, rejuvenation of the commons. I used to daydream about starting a WISP and bootstrapping it into a FTTH provider, but I find I was mostly interested in the fiddling with and improving administrative/management software suites for WISPs and traditional ISPs. (I worked my way into tech from being a wisp/fttx technician for a summer job.)

Stay alive. Stay in the country where I live. Get some new assignment. Have the capacity to work. Survive.

hello fellow Ukrainian. we will get through this.

Honestly? the main goal is surviving. 2022 fucked me so hard: my mental health was going downhill, my marriage is not in the best state, a war nearby, inflation, job issues, etc. I wasn't even recovering from 2021/2020. I really need a break.

Yeah, even without the external factors, personal goals can get tiring year after year.

1. Resume seeing the world. I haven't taken a trip abroad since the tail end of 2019.

2. Cultivate a mutual and meaningful friendship with someone. A non-existent social circle and approaching my fourth decade doesn't make this any easier.

Just some vague ideas for now:

* Start updating all my published ebooks (will probably take more than a year)

* Create apps for interactive exercises

* Contribute to FOSS a lot more than I've been doing so far

* Start trekking regularly again, perhaps get into cycling too

- Started learning Japanese in 2022, so I’d love to pass JLPT N5 of N4 in 2023. These are beginner levels, so not very useful for anything, but it would be so cool!

- I’d like to start a micro-startup. I do a lot of open source, but would like to do paid work for a change! I have a few ideas, but need to learn how to make them billable.

- I very slowly started moving from Gmail to an email address with a custom domain name. I need to double down on that and get away from Gmail asap. I can’t stand Google anymore and Gmail is my biggest remaining tie to them.

- be a better husband. I came off as selfish and inattentive in recent months. This needs to change.

- Spend more time with my family.

- Find a way to better engage with my town and community. I grew up where I live now, but still feel a little disconnected.

- Continue reading. Started reading again, this year. Want to keep up with that.

- Join the 1000lbs club. This is the follow up to this year’s goal of a 135 overhead / 225 Bench / 315 Squat / 405 DL

- finally finish my PhD. Still waiting for my Advisor to finish his report…

- relax more, stress less about income

the same as any year - keep working two hours a workday on my business until I don't need a day job :)

Agree :)

settle in the netherlands (my family and i are moving to amsterdam in january).

it's going to be a huge change for us too -- going from a tropical country to an european city, not only not knowing the city itself (we've never been to AMS, only to London), but also, we don't speak any dutch (although my coworkers said i don't really need dutch, my wife and i are trying to learn it).

Good luck, it'll be a great experience!

I think there is plenty who experience this, but I felt like a small breakthrough happen when I took command and only used Norwegian instead of falling back to English. It helped a lot and even if it is not the best, it's opening doors in my career here, in that I am able to get interviews with mostly Norwegian speaking companies. :)

I think you do well to learn Dutch. People here speak English well, the universities are a magnet for international students and especially Amsterdam is quite international, so changes are that you will order something in a cafe in your best dutch and they would not understand you, because you speak Dutch.

Your coworkers left out an important detail though: on the workfloor, in the shops, anywhere, speaking English is fine. When socializing, there you will face obstacles.

After work hours are for relaxing. So, having to speak in English makes it less optimal, even if the Dutch are really willing to accommodate you there. Quite naturally, people will drop to Dutch again during conversations. If one have to make jokes, common references and all the stuff for which you need a finer touch which your mother tongue provides for, falling back to a foreign langue is a degradation. 1) vocabulary, 2) emulation vs native speed.

If you are with six dutchies and you are the only one that forces everyone to have a "degraded experience" of a fun night, you do well to try to learn Dutch. Tell them to fuck off if they switch to English when you want them to speak Dutch, so you can learn.

You can be direct and honest with the dutch, that is appreciated. When people start to insult you, congratulations! They are joking and signaling they accept you as one of them. You should respond with another insult.

When we do something social, we plan. Don't just drop by and assume you will be invited over for dinner. Dutch people are anti-social or well organized, pick your perspective. This is definitely a difference with more tropical social climates.

If you move in January, brace for cold, dim days. When spring comes, everything will look nicer.

Good luck!

Good luck! In Amsterdam you won't need any Dutch, except occasionally when you have to sign some government papers. But a little Dutch will certainly let you enjoy your stay a lot better!

1. Find a remote infrastructure job in the data science / machine learning space.

2. Move abroad if the said job requires some onsite time, but I'd rather not.

3. Start my own business, my country is kinda late on software stuff and can't afford western product. It's a gap I can fill I think.

4. Grow my online presence

1. B1 in European Portuguese. (Wife and I got our A2 this year and are seriously considering moving to Porto).

2. Actually start updating my blog with my research.

3. Shift the weight that's piled on the last few years

4. Start the new job search, just hit 5 years at my current role and I'm getting seriously itchy feat.

Curious here, where are you from and why are you considering moving to Porto?

Move family across continents, twice. Farewell dying parent. Move business across continents, once. Raise substantial funds at twice prior valuation. Find new everything: house/school/co-workers/site/equipment suppliers. Get back to work.

Launch three things. Haven’t decided what yet, but I feel I need to put more stuff out there.

Find as many moments where I can reach perfect internal balance and experience the incredible joy of being alive.

It's not going to be easy, my corporate job will demand a lot of me, most of me. But my resolution is to fight to create brief moments of freedom.

-hope i didn't get affected with covid even though it's not a big deal.

-stay healthy as dreamed.Sleep early and quit smoking.

-stick to onething cuz the more you're trying to figure out,the more likely you ended up knowing nothing throughly.

-smile more and don't overthink

Time has rendered my goals impossible or irrelevant. I see little value in creating new ones, since life seems to be something which largely just happens to us, and the choices we can control are comparatively trivial.

oh great i'm gonna use this next time someone asks me

1. Get a new job in software dev

2. Get better with everyday Norwegian (that new job should take care of that)

3. Get to A1 level in French (Bonjour, monsieur !)

4. Get through my list of books

5. Start a toy side project only to present something and make small programs for myself along the way

Love to see so many people wanting to learn or improve in foreign languages. Good luck, you can do it! :)

I saw your post on learning Czech - that was another consideration for me. :) I bought a A1 book when I was on one of my trips to Prague but never really dug into it.

Ah cool, it's a challenge but if you like languages it's pretty fun. French is maybe more useful, though!

Have more money coming in than going out. Escape from the city back to the country.

Get out of the negative income per month, even a 1 day per week remote gig would work, but employers are either all or nothing. There are no part time remote jobs in Germany, at least not that I'm aware of.

Fix teeth, get glasses.

Finish my current project.

Survive.

1. Find a good contract and make some money before "software developer" stops being a thing.

2. Maybe finally, at 35, start studying for a BSc.

3. Get my programming language / desktop environment / editor project into a useful state.

Software developers are not going away any time soon, however much open AI hype would want that, writing code is a very, very small part of our job

if not "writing software" at least, debugging and fixing it :)

- Find a job which i don't hate to wake up to - get back to basics - lose 23 lbs

1. Come up with an idea for a side hustle

2. Make a sale from side hustle

3. Make another sale from side hustle

Find more time to be with family and friends.

Spend less time on social media (first year this is a thing for me, but I joined NAFO early on and it was addictive in addition to very meaningful for me).

I had a few folks at thanksgiving dinner talk about being active in NAFO, which I had never heard of. They shared some hilarious memes. Seems like a pretty big group.

Nothing bro I just want to be a dev and vibe, no kidding.

1. Spend time with my son.

2. Fix habits

list(itertools.product(['eat', 'exercise', 'sleep'],['well', 'on-time']))

3. Interview for golang jobs

- somehow make my business survive the recent 10 billion dollar fraud

- otherwise, find work that permits me to care about performance and doesn't pay pennies

1. Move to another city and leave my current one

2. Start settling down and find a life partner

3. Work on my side project and figure out if there is a chance

4. Figure out the next part of my life

- Get debt free (on track)

- Slowly transition in to a business I have been building through 2022

- Get around £1m in revenue (not unrealistic)

- Compete in the CrossFit open and place well

1. Start reading (Atleast 12 books in a year) 2. Start writing technical article (1 article a week) 3. Better work-life balance

- Learn Japanese and get N5 at least. - Learn about Heuristics. - Be better husband. - Finish my thesis.

Only one for now and it’s learn to draw

- Grow https://golang.cafe

- Start DevOps consultancy

Find a new job. The market has been terrible for managerial level positions (VP Product etc).

Mine are, loosely,

- find better/more interesting work

- Build more model kits than I buy, reduce my model backlog

- Travel to Asia

1. get a software development job in big tech or finance

2. lose 33lbs/15kg of bodyweight

3. get treatment for ADHD

easier to start at 3

- Make significant progress on my passion project

- Make significant progress on learning Korean

- Lose ~40 lbs

try to escape abject poverty

I did, at some level. Good luck to you!

Thank you and congrats, it's quite the achievement

Staying alive. We don't appreciate enough how important that is.

Buy a first property at pre-pandemic level prices, without mortgage.

Get a Leetcode t-shirt

- Produce a new product quarterly for my passion project

- Get a better job

- Build the SaaS app I have planned.

- Launch a freestyle fpv channel

- Do a lot of fishing

Practice documentation in projects

Not getting laid off. Keep saving money. Stay healthy.

Complete msc

Rethink current job and maybe try to find compiler job

- read more books (hoping for ~50)

- study a lot more

- complete CS50x

- get my life in order

- Get AWS certified

- Get a grad Cert in cyber security

- drop some Kgs

1. Trying to focus on one goal.

2. Do the goal.

Become a CTO.

Travel

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