I have a hard time passing up a significant calendar event as an opportunity to reflect and synthesize past experiences. Having said that, while I had a pretty good year, it was not a year of big changes. There were a lot of pretty interesting and fun smaller changes and developments in my world and my projects in the last year. In no particular order:

  • This was the year that I went from being “someone who tinkers on code” to being someone who can write code when the situation calls for it. This felt like an revolutionary change as it happened, but I recognize now that it has been a long time coming and in retrospect

  • This was the year where I finally slayed my copy quality woes. I’ve long struggled with producing clean copy (English text) in a reasonable amount of time (without spelling/grammar errors.) A couple years ago, I got to a point where I could write clean copy but it felt like I had to spend hours being neurotic. Now, I’ve trained myself to catch things in much more quickly. I’m not perfect, but it’s no longer something that I feel like I struggle with constantly.

  • I reevaluated my relationship with my hobbies and avocational pursuits. I decided to spend more time learning about technology and computer science, I decided to spend less time writing science fiction and less time knitting. I decided to prioritize my social/folk times to go to more singings both in town and out of town, and focus my dancing around spending time with my friends rather than dancing for the sake of dancing.

  • This was the year that I decided to stay in New York City. I’ve been here for almost three years now, and I like living here. While I can envision living somewhere else in the right situation, I think I’ve decided to stay for the long haul. This has meant doing things like furniture shopping (though not buying,) and saving for the eventual purchase of an apartment.

  • I worked too much. But I think I accomplished cool things. In most ways, I think we’re doing some really innovative things with documentation and documentation processes (and writing strong documentation for a cool product.) There have been struggles, as always, but it’s been good. And a lot of work. I don’t think that I would go back and change anything, but I do look forward to trying to establish a little more sanity here.

    There are other things, of course, but that covers it. It seems hard to avoid making resolutions, or at least articulating goals at his juncture:

  • Keep doing the cool things that I’m doing: learning, coding, doing cool things at work.

  • Develop a reading practice. I love reading things, but I’m not very good at reading regularly and keeping up with my reading habit. I’d like to read novels as well as stay generally on top of Asimov’s (and potentially the New York Review of Science Fiction.)

  • Develop a more extensive knitting practice. Full post on the subject forth coming, but I want to knit because I enjoy the activity of knitting and the cadence of making things like socks.

    I want to stop feeling like my knitting needs to have an increasing complexity to make it interesting, or that every thing I knit needs to be unique in some specific way.

  • Become proficient in a programming language that isn’t Python.

  • Start or restart a non-day-job related writing project, and implement a project plan that centers on regular ongoing progress rather than binges.

Coming Soon: Thoughts on implementing goals.

Happy New Year!