watsonarw

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

As we begin 2017, many people will have made New Year’s resolutions. I’ve never been a big fan of making a resolution to bring in the new year, preferring instead to set my goals throughout the year. But I find myself with a bit of time now (whilst not at work), and I want to use it to document my current goals. My hope is that by writing them down, and giving myself measurable targets, it will motivate me to achieve them.

Keep learning

Learning has always been important to me, and continually learning has for a long time been a goal of mine. I often joke that “I want to know everything”, but whilst I understand that literally knowing everything is impossible, I want to get as close as I possibly can.

In 2016, I completed the Spanish language tree in Duolingo, and I want to solidify my Spanish understanding. I hope to continue my Duolingo streak for at least another 300 days (I’m currently at 301).

I was fortunate enough to work on a project recently that involved a lot of React, and it was very enjoyable. I want to use it in some personal projects, and hope to make an open source library of common React components.

I’m also hoping to learn a few new programming languages that I haven’t worked with before. Currently, my list includes Go, Python and Elixir. I want to make something useful using each of them.

Give back

For a while, I’ve wanted to get more involved in giving back to the open source community, and to society in general. I often blame a lack of time, but not having an explicit goal probably contributes just as much.

I use a lot of open source software, libraries, and tools; from Atom, to Docker, to Jekyll, and many of the libraries that I use in my projects. I want to give back to the open source community, and make a goal of contributing to open source projects more often. I plan to make at least one contribution a month to open source projects that aren’t my own.

I also want to give back more to society in general. To do this, I hope to be able to make a significant contribution to a project that supports social justice.

Improve this blog

When I started this blog, I wanted to document my thoughts. I then promptly did nothing with it for 9 months. This isn’t because I’ve had nothing to write about, I started a few posts, but never finished them.

So for starters, I want to get better at writing, and I’m going to write at least one post a month for this blog. Hopefully my other goals give me content to write about, so I hope to include my progress on them here too (yes, I know that’s more than one a month).

I also want to add some other things to this blog, like HTTPS, category pages, and some kind of interactivity. Some of these might will involve re-platforming (and at least moving away from github pages), which should be an interesting experience.

So there it is, my goals for the near future. My hope is that by writing them down, it will motivate me to accomplish them.