Resolutions for the New Year
I’m not usually big on new year’s resolutions. If something is worth changing, why wait til year’s end? This year, however, it just so happens that motivation to improve has hit me at the right time to join the fun with everyone else.
- Contribute to other open source software projects. I’ve mostly abandoned my GPL licensed PHP/MySQL based framework Saint to work with Ruby on Rails, and I’d also like to gain some experience working as part of a larger project. In all the projects I’ve done I’ve had lead and worked with at most three other developers. It’s fun to lead, but it’s not as educational as working under a more skilled leader. [Update: Turns out what I did was hire advisors and build a bigger team. More on this later.]
- Read one non-fiction book each month which helps me improve myself personally or professionally. I recently completed The Passionate Programmer and am currently on chapter twelve of Rails 3 in Action, so I’m off to a decent start on this resolution. [Update: I don’t think I reached one per month, but I’ve definitely increased my professional reading. Probably one every two months on average; a work in progress!]
- Write one new blog post each week. There are many reasons I don’t write more blog posts, but most of them are overshadowed by one simple fact: I don’t think of myself as an expert on any subject, so why should people listen to me? However, that is insecurity taking over. I don’t have to be the best in order to help someone. I just have to know something they don’t, and not everyone has studied the things I’ve spent time learning. With that in mind, I shall attempt to ignore the voice in my head screaming “no-one cares, you’re just cluttering up the internet” and write posts which I hope will help someone in the future. [Update: Obviously I’ve completely failed at this, for a number of reasons, but I’m hoping to improve in the future.]
- Work out. Daily. Throughout school I was active on a daily (and sometimes nightly) basis. Now, things have changed. I work from home and don’t have any requirement to leave the house on a daily basis. I’m starting to notice the inevitable physical outcome of this change in lifestyle and I don’t like it. I need more energy during the day. It’s time to get back in shape. [Update: Yesterday (2015/12/16) I benched 180 lbs for the first time. I’ve gone from 138 lbs when I posted this to ~170 lbs, mostly an increase in muscle. This is going fairly well.]
Adding four new habits at a time is likely to prove challenging for me. I never feel like I have enough time to spare. After all, there’s always something “more important” going on, right?
Wrong! I can’t let that delusion stop me. Improving my health, skills, and networking is beneficial to the bottom line of making Carburetor successful. It’s also very good for me physically and psychologically.
With that in mind I’ll be speaking to you soon, folks. I’m aiming to post on the 7th and every subsequent Monday.
P.S. Looks like my blog interface needs some love too. It’s not exactly a priority, but I’ll be getting around to it [Update: Finally doing so. Converting it to Jekyll and styling].