A review of 2014 and plans for 2015

Success

  • Writing: I’ve written 30 posts this year compared to 15 in 2012. I’m not great at writing, but it’s getting better. This blog got 7,904 visits this year compared to 3,271 last year. I think it’s a bit of a fluke due to one high-traffic post. I’ve started writing 750 words a day, a lot of which turns into blog posts. This explains why I’ve been posting more often lately.
  • Focus: I’ve cut down on a lot of online life to focus on pretty much 2 things: Work and my contribution to Mozilla. Burnout is real and I’ve gone through it. Not doing that again 🙂 This year’s daily focus is going add an hour or two of studying to that list.
  • Read more non-fiction: I read at least 7 non-fiction books and they were all a great read. I fully recommend following The Farnam Street if you’d like recommendations.
  • Travel: I’ve been to Tanzania, Germany, UK, and the US this year. Here’s to more travels in 2015!
  • Accounting. For the last 2 years, my accounts have been a mess. I caught up this year and fixed them all up and I’ve paid back taxes until now and filed returns to date. This year’s challenge is going to be tracking my spending more tightly and budgeting a bit better.

Not quite success:

  • An exercise habit. I love running now, though, I’m nowhere close to consistent. It didn’t help that I had quite a bit of travel and moved cities this year. I’m hoping the somewhat better stability this year will help. Since July, I’ve only had 15 workouts. I’m hoping to have about 120 work outs this year. That’s 3 workouts a week with a 20{13371f13f0bf161e7595c2ac5df92e005bed3de1d132ef646d0a44f3a1a9ee62} leeway.
  • Learn C. Going to try this one again. I tried unsuccessfully to learn Scala and Haskell. In retrospect, I should have focused on just C. That’s what I’ll try this year.
  • Learn JavaScript. I still don’t understand large swaths of it, but I built a thing with backbone! This is definitely on my goals for this year after C.
  • Cut down on the unnecessary from my online life. I’ve stopped committing to things I can’t finish, and given up commitments that I knew I couldn’t manage. My move from Google also went pretty well. Right now, I’m stuck with a bit too many servers. That’s a project to tackle this year.

New Challenges

  • Work on my bachelor’s degree. For those of who don’t know me well enough, I’ve still not finished a bachelor’s degree. I enrolled in a course in June last year and I’ve been lazy about it till December. I’ve started working on it strongly lately. My goal is to set a habit of spending at least 1 hour every day for studies.
  • Build more things. I completely enjoyed building the Salary Converter in 2012 and hgstats this year. In 2015, I want to build more things and play with new technology for some time. The alternative is to improve the existing projects with some new technology. I’ve been wanting to convert the Salary Converter into a fully JS app.

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