Goals for 2014

Haven’t done something like this for a while but at least at that I succeeded last year. Anyway, I thought about finally writing some of my goals for this new year down to force myself not to forget them after the first week of January. Historically, I’m pretty sure I won’t succeed at completing all of them but at least I will have tried.

1. Doing more in Go

Over the last couple of months I’ve tried to find more and more time to dive into Go. So far I only managed to create or port over some small scripts but it was great fun. And I just love exploring a whole new world of libraries and developer tools!

Naturally, this all works better when you have a proper project to work on while learning all this new stuff. I’m not yet sure what that project (or projects) will be. Perhaps I will simply rewrite this blog in Go or write some deployment helpers etc.

2. More weekend-trips

Weekend-Trips are awesome! They get you away from the laptop for at least 24 hours (sitting in the hotel at night is fine), the don’t require taking a vacation and you get to see a new place.

In 2013 I did such trips to Berlin and Utrecht and they’ve been probably my most memorable journeys last year. They also combined the whole trip with attending coding sprints which is great for getting to know new people but also slightly detrimental to the whole “less sitting behind a computer” idea.

3. More diverse conferences

In previous years I went mostly to Python and Django conferences. I love both communities but I think it is time to adapt my conference habits to my development work: I only code so much in Django while working quite a lot in other environments like JavaScript, Java and hopefully even more in Go eventually.

I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to attend gophercon this year since I would have to extend another trip for another week or so, but I’m pretty sure there will be a lot of other opportunities.

The first cut I will probably make here is to not attend this year’s DjangoCon.eu. I already hope to attend three other conferences in the first half of 2014 and I want to keep some vacaction time for the other six months. If I won’t be able to make it to one of these, I will definitely reconsider!

4. Even more reading

Last year I managed to read 23 books and I enjoyed nearly every minute of it. Compared to something like watching a movie, a book offers me a much deeper look into the world the story represents, which is extremely important to me.