My Goals for 2020

I don’t usually write (publicly) down any new year’s resolutions but as I feel like I’ve been finding more and more excuses of writing less and finishing fewer hobby projects, some public peer pressure would help me to maintain some focus. So here we go; my tech-related goals for the year 2020.

1. Publish Weekly Blog Posts

On this one I have to take a somewhat late start as January almost flew by already, but I’m targetting to write to this blog at least ~50 new posts this year. I love writing and I do write quite a lot but I’ve lost the habbit of doing it in the form of blog posts — and I want to get that habbit back.

I have tons of stuff in various draft posts and even more ideas about things to write about and I’m looking forward to make myself find a good publishing rhythm after a long hiatus. So stay tuned! 🙂

2. Release / Document More Hobby Projects

One of my biggest problems is that I love digging into new technologies and starting something but then never actually getting anything published (nor documenting the journey). I want to learn to be better especially in the documenting part as I know that it’s where I can contribute the most (compared to actual coding, for example).

3. Release At Least Two Serious Side Projects

I’ve been working on a side project called Slipmat.io for almost four years without actually committing to getting it properly published. I’ve also sat on a good idea (in my opinnion) without moving it forward for a couple of years now and I really want to get both of these projects in a better place.

While Slipmat is more of a hobby project, the second idea is something that could actually be turned into a proper SaaS business if done correctly. Both of these require a lot of time to complete so I really need to learn to split things up in smaller iterations and move faster if I’m going to pull this off. I’ll be documenting both of these journeys here, so again, stay tuned.

4. Attend To a New Tech Conference

I’ve been attending to Python-related conferences since 2007. This year I want to find a new non-Python conference to find different perspectives into the world of modern software development.

5. Fix My Tooling

When I was younger, I was constantly obsessing over my tooling to make my workflows faster and better. Lately I’ve noticed that my hatred towards computers and technology has grown so big that I’m usually just happy if my tools even start. The Web tooling has gotten so big and complex that it takes serious time and effort to keep everything up to date — not to mention of trying to optimize things.

I want to make some time and rebuild some very basic stuff (starting with dotfiles) around my personal tooling, document them better and start to get back on top of things again. Continuous improvement, Kaizen, is something that I’m really passionate about so this is again a goal that is hopefully going to lead to some interesting and fullfilling paths.

So, there are my five fairly ambitious goals for 2020. Now, it’s time for some action!