2013 – The good and the bad

2013 has been good fun and terrible, at the same time.

The Good

• Moved to my own apartment. I’ve been longing to do this for ages. An apartment with a wall full of books. I think I’ve managed to achieve that 😉
• Cooked for myself for nearly most of the year. There were occasions where I burned food, but it’s overall been a joyful experience.
• Last year involved quite a bit of travel: 3 trips to London, a trip to San Francisco, and a trip to Kenya.
• Met lots of people I’ve wanted to meet for ages. The Mozilla summit and the London trips helped particularly.
• I bought a Kobo in 2013 and according to it, I’ve read 37 books. I don’t even know how many physical books I’ve read.
• Work has been great with nearly 100 commits on CKAN. Lots of new features and bug fixes on which I’ve taken the initiative. I say this constantly, but I’ll reiterate: I work with the most amazing people.
• Usually, I’m shy and not very talkative. I started with meeting people I know but hadn’t met, to meeting completely new people.
• Writing. My blog was mostly ignored since end of 2012. Managed to pick it up and I wrote 15 posts.

The Bad

• Health-wise, 2013 has been an absolute disaster. I’ve been admitted to the hospital at least 3 times. As I write this, I have a cough from a throat infection. Sigh.
• The sedentary lifestyle has affected my overall fitness, Instead of losing weight, I’ve gained weight. Staying at my parents’ for 2 months probably contributed to it as well.
• Despite the fact that I like writing, I couldn’t even start NaNoWriMo.
• Frontend development. Still ashamed of my skills with Javascript and CSS.

Before I read this post I read, I read Sean Ogle’s excellent post about resolutions. With that in mind, I’ve set some for 2014. I’m going to be tracking them month-by-month and posting updates every quarter (I even have calender reminders!).

2014

• An exercise habit, tracked by number of days in a month I did not exercise.
• Learn to write C. I’m going to work through Learn C the Hard Way which has 52 exercise and seems perfect for a year-long project.
• Read more non-fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed the non-fiction books I read last year (Quiet by Susan Cain and Bad Science by Dr. Ben Goldacre. I recommend them both!). My goal is to read 6 non-fiction books by the end of the year.
• Write! Blog posts or perhaps a short story. I still don’t have a particularly good idea about writing a book, but sitting down and writing a book, even if it’s terrible, seems like a good way to start getting better.
• JavaScript. We have a complicated relationship that needs to be sorted out 😉
• Cut down on the unnecessary from my online life. I started this by the end of 2013 and this is going to continue into 2014. I’ve been deleting accounts from sites I don’t use anymore, killing servers that I pay for but don’t use, cutting down IRC channels significantly (went from 150 channels to 35), and more.