New Year’s Resolutions for 2010
It is a new year and I hope to make it a better one. With that in mind, here are a few of the things I hope to accomplish in 2010. Not all are directly relevant to web development, but so be it.
- Post More Often
Look! The least original resolution in the age of blogging! Even so. There are many times I think of something that would make a good post and never get around to writing it. Sometimes other things come up. Other times, someone else has written something similar and I don’t want to be redundant. But much of the time, I get distracted and either forget the idea entirely or wait too long and the moment passes.
Not every post has to be a winner and certainly most of mine are not, but as the misquotation goes “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” If I put more of my ideas into writing and write more often, several things should happen. First, the occasional winning idea is more likely to make it past my fingertips and onto this or another site. Second, my writing muscles should become more limber. Writing begets writing and makes each successive piece easier to put into words. Third, I hope this will help me find more of a voice on this site. This has long been a problem for me. I am not a particularly formal person. In fact, I am probably a bit too casual. Unfortunately, whether from spending too long in academia and then too long in corporate land, or from spending too little time practicing the craft of writing in recent years, I find that my writing can be formal to the point of stiffness. I would prefer that whatever personality I may possess show through a bit and perhaps help me express my ideas more clearly. Of course, none of that has happened here, but one can hope.
- Finish Personal Projects
We all have personal projects, things that we aren’t getting paid for maybe, but which are important to us. Some help us learn and some make us feel good about ourselves, some can improve our lives and some are just fun. I don’t know what your projects are and I won’t bore you with the bulk of mine here, but I want to get better about finishing them.
- Try to understand better what I find rewarding
Think I could vague that up for you a little? This one was just about programming at first, but has became more generalized. It originated, as too many good ideas do, in the shower. I was thinking about what language I most like programming in (no idea why) and the more I thought about it, the less clear the answer was. I use Perl for quick and dirty, which is satisfying when I just want something done. I use PHP for most web stuff for much the same reason. I am increasingly using Python for things that used to grow into heinous Perl scripts from hell and I generally feel better about the results. I must admit that I find C very satisfying to program in, if only for a sense that I really understand everything it is doing at a very low level. I spent a number of years working with Common Lisp and have a nostalgic fondness for Lisp in general as a result.
But which do I like using? I’ve been programming (not counting Basic, because, well, you know) for 26 years now, and I honestly could not tell you which I like best. I can tell you a few I don’t like. Modula-2 and Pascal didn’t stand much of a chance once I hit C. Prolog, CLU, ML, nope. C++ is a definite pass. Hell, I’ve even programming in COBOL. Java? That’s another whole post.
This year, I want to suss out what I find rewarding (not just enjoy, but rewarding on any level) and why. If I can do that, I can try to limit those things that provide little return and do more of those that give something back.
- Learn Django
How’s that for contrast? From abstract to concrete in one resolution. I hadn’t given Django much notice until kickme444 and his elves built the Reddit Secret Santa site using it. Not only was the site responsive, functional, and attractive, but they built it in seemingly no time flat. So, Django is on my hit list for this year. Probably not this month, but definitely this year.
- Spend my social networking time differently.
Currently, I spend most of my social networking time on Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. With Facebook, I keep up with the day-to-day nonsense of friends, colleagues, etc. and that it nice for what it is. There is a comforting, if somewhat artificial, sense of contact there. I will continue with it, as it lets me keep in touch without much effort.
Reddit is another matter. I love Reddit, but it is a time vampire. I stop in to see what is going on and hours pass. I got no work is done. Often, I didn’t learn anything terribly useful. I may have had an interesting discussion, but more often than not I simply spectate. My Reddit habit must be tamed. I am not sure how that will be done just yet, but done it must be.
Then there is Twitter. If the above paragraph did not earn me eternal downvotes, this one will. I often find Twitter more useful to me than Reddit on a time-investment basis. There, I’ve said it. Some of this is because of the Reddit time loss effect, which dilutes the return. Another part may be that I am using Twitter wrong.
My impression is that Twitterers are supposed to tweet to each other and follow each other and read every little thing each other are doing. I don’t do that. There are a couple of accounts I follow and I sometimes I send a tweet to someone, but largely I user Twitter as a real-time search engine. Searching Twitter helps me find out what is going on right now. I can find the newest Wordpress themes or plugins, the word on a new TV show that looked interesting, or if your-favorite-site-hereis really down? I’ve found it useful the last few months and expect to use it more.
- Write more.
I know that I mentioned posting more often as the first resolution, but this one is a little different. I used to love writing. In high school, I wanted to be the first published member of our class. I was a creative writing major for two and a half years in college. I was part of a local science fiction writers’ group. It was a big deal for me.
Then Lycos happened. I don’t know of it was a lack of time management skills or what, but I had not time for writing while working at Lycos when it was in startup mode. By the time it was more stabilized and I had a little breathing time in my week, the writing was gone. I had let it go and never got it back.
It has been a decade now since I left Lycos and I want my writing back. I don’t know if I was any good, but it was a part of me and I intend to reclaim it. As with the blog posting, it will take a lot of hamfisted clunkers to get off the ground, but nothing great every came easily.
- Read more.
Somewhere in there I fell out of reading for a while too. Oh, I still read during the last decade, but there was a much higher concentration of technical books and random articles than there was fiction or even nonfiction (but nontechnical) books. In high school and college, I polished off a book a week, which was pretty good since I am a slow reader for some reason. But I let it slide. I became complacent. I was seduced by the Internet and the television. Now, neither the Internet nor TV is inherently evil. There is some good stuff on TV. Lost is fantastic. House is enjoyable. Dexter and True Blood fill in the cracks. Carnivale and Deadwood ended too soon. But I didn’t stop at the few good things. I just left the damn thing on. And I think that same bad habit is was has made Reddit into a vice for me. There is too much out that that is somewhat interesting, that is sort of cool, that might be useful to know. I have reined in the TV and the Internet will follow suit. I love the reading and as I’ve been doing more of it lately, I have had an odd feeling like I was waking up. It is a good feeling that I intend to nurture.
There are a few other more mundane resolutions in there. Lose weight. Exercise more. Stop drinking Coke. Spend more time with my kids. Put down the laptop when hanging with my family. Those don’t need explanation.
All of this, of course, could be summed up more simply: I resolve to get my head out of my ass and focus on what matters.
But what kind of post would that have been?
Reading your list, I have to say I feel a sense of familiarity. I used to spend time shortly after college writing short stories and I had big plans for a novel that never came close to materializing. It gave me something to think about, a reason to get up and start working first thing in the morning. I’ve also been cutting back on my reading, from about a book a week to a book a month (or longer), the vast majority of which are technical / business / marketing non-fiction.
My only real resolution is to create a large body of portfolio work this year. I’m attempting to crank out 104 website designs in 52 weeks, and so far I’ve got two done (behind schedule, but not too bad). I am thinking about picking up a few of your resolutions now as well – I spend far too much of my social media time lurking rather than participating. Thanks for putting into words some ideas that had been floating around in my head for a while now.