Goals for 2016

So the new year is already more than a week old and so I thought it would be time to start thinking about what I want to achive in 2016. Last year was one full of language experiments: Elixir, Clojure, Haskell, … but I’m mostly happy with Go, Python, and JavaScript for now (and possibly either Clojure or Elixir again for dipping a bit into more or less pure functional programming) so my focus should be elsewhere in 2016.

After brooding over this post for a couple of days (and thinking about goals since my return from the Congress) I’ve decided on the following goals. Some of them are perhaps a bit of wishful-thinking, but I’ve dediced to aim semi-high for a change 😉

Becoming an Angel

… in the sense of becoming a volunteer at the next Congress (33C3). On 32C3 I was immensely impressed by all these hard working volunteers keeping the whole event. At other conferences, folks volunteers before the event and only minor things are still open for grabs later one. PyCon is a bit of an exception here were help is always welcome and some organisational tasks become their own little community event, like the bag-filling-event on the afternoon before the main conference starts.

Here, on the other hand, volunteers are organized through the so-called Engelsystem through which work-shifts are planned and which also makes it easier for outsiders to see if there is still help needed. If there is, all you have to do is sign up, show up, and get the work done (after reading and following the guidelines available on the event’s wiki, obviously).

I guess, for the next congress I have to find a spare GSM handset. Let’s see if that old Sony CMD Z5 still works 😉

More blogging

Writing about things in a public (or at least in a semi-public manner when doing that internally at work) has always helped me with thinking things (more) through compared to using tools like Twitter which are more spontanous.

Blog posts are also a better way to archive experiences than putting them into a commercial silo that might be gone from one day to another. That’s also why I opted to start my little travelogue instead of posting reviews for restaurants, hotels, etc. on platforms like Yelp. Sure, I do that too, but the version that is important is on a platform that I control and can move around if things go south.

I’ve been letting that one sit around for a bit too long unattended, but I will try to integrate it better into my journey-days from now on 😊

Same goes for my main blog which you’re reading right now. 36 posts in 2015 wasn’t that bad, but I’d prefer to have at least one post up every week. In 2013 I had a little series going called “Weekly research” where I picked a topic I wanted to investigate every single week. To everybody’s surpise that didn’t really worked out for more than a couple of weeks, but it turned out to be a great way to force myself to look at things in depth. I really want to get back there. Weekly is not really an option, but I’ll definitely use blog posts in such a way again in 2016… hopefully 😊

Moving

I’ve been in Graz for about 6.5 years now. I like the city but I think it is finally time to move on. While the infrastructure is decent, whenever I go to far larger cities like Montréal, Munich, Paris, or Amsterdam I’m blown away by all the things that are available there. Having to have an additional hop for whatever flight I need doesn’t help either. Perhaps I will finally make that big jump to somewhere else this year.

Re-learning French

Back at school I quite enjoyed French but due to lack of use I completely forgot everything I’ve ever learnt. I’ve been twice to Montréal, twice to Paris and once to Brussels in the last two years and at all these times my old level in that language would have come in very handy. Enough of that. I’ve re-started the French course in Duolingo again and this time I’ll finish it and afterwards continue onwards!

Contributing more

There are so many roads to walk on to help the OpenSource/FreeSoftware community: Becoming a FSFE Fellow, writing documentation, contributing code, helping others to contribute… Perhaps I can find a good mix here but I definitely want to do more on this front than in 2015.

And if I can combine that with doing more with Django, Go, Python, Node then all the better 😃

OK, 5 goals is more than enough 😉 Let’s see which of these I’ll actually end up having completed in about 12 months from now 😊