Goals for 2022
A New Year on the Cimarron (1903) by Frederic Remington, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m typically pretty averse to making “new year’s resolutions,” but in the spirit of learning in public and holding myself accountable, I figured I’d put a few goals out there that I can check in against throughout the year.
Write more
I’d like to write at least 12 posts on this site. There are no strict rules on what constitutes a “post,” so it can be as simple as a monthly update or as in-depth as my last post. I’ve got a few topics of varying degrees of complexity in my backlog and it stands to reason that inspiration should strike at least a few more times between now and next January.
You can keep up on what I end up writing via RSS. If you’d prefer to be notified via email, you can paste the RSS feed URL into a service like Feedrabbit or Blogtrottr.
Read more
According to Goodreads, I finished 20 books in 2021. My goal for last year was 30, which was probably a bit ambitious. Splitting the difference, I’ll set a goal to read 25 books.
Furthermore, I’d like at least 3 of those books to be nominally “technical,” i.e. vaguely related to my work (statistics, machine learning, software engineering, and so on). I’m already a good chunk of the way into The Programmer’s Brain by Felienne Hermans, so that’s a nice head start. I also make progress in fits and starts through Designing Data-Intensive Applications, but it’s a heady 600+ pager, so we’ll see how that goes. If you’ve got a suggestion for a good read on anything loosely related to production data science, I’d love to hear it.
Learn more
I have access to Udemy and Ardan Labs through work, so this past year I took a Go course and a short course on Protobuf, as well as the Ardan Labs’ Docker course.
Next year I’d like to take (at least) one online course—and that’s not counting the Ardan Labs Kubernetes course that I’ll also be taking through work. Maybe this is the year I’ll finally finish Bayesian Methods for Hackers!
I’d also like to start having conversations in French. I’ve been learning very basic French on Babbel, but it’s about time I take the next step and start taking classes with a human teacher (in some pandemic-friendly format). I want to be able to spontaneously produce sentences rather than just being able to slowly make sense of written text.
Take more photos
A photo I took on a trip to Budapest in the summer of 2018—just one of thousands I've yet to properly go through.
I love to take photographs, and I take photos on my phone all the time. However, I also have a Nikon D7200 that I’m not taking advantage of nearly enough, so I’d like to shoot two new batches of photos and post the highlights to this site this year.
I’ve also got thousands of years-old photos from trips to Hawaii, Budapest, Prague, and Berlin that I haven’t yet processed, so it’d be nice to make some progress sorting through that backlog too.
See you in 2022
That seems like plenty to take on already, so I’ll stop here. If you want to keep up with me in 2022, you can find me on Twitter or follow my writing via RSS.
Happy new year! 🎊 🎉