Goals for 2017

This year it took me even longer to come up with some goals for the new year 😊 2016 was a bit of a weird ride and 2017 set out to be even more of an extraordinary year for me judging by its first two weeks. As such I thought I’d try to change my focus for my goals a bit this time around:

Get a life

This is probably the hardest topic of anything in here to write about. Over the last couple of years I’ve prioritized work- and OSS-related topics over pretty much everything else, probably in part due to feeling a bit like an imposter whatever I do. This also put sleep extremely high on my priority list with the obvious consequences.

This year I will try to move things around a little bit. Slightly less sleep, slightly less being obsessed with the craft, more time for my friends (I love you, folks!) and for getting to know new people!

I’m not yet sure how this will involve or affect my moving plans/ideas but an effect it definitely will have.

Less grumpy

From time to time I tend to be a bit too grumpy when something annoys me (and quite a lot of things do). This is not helpful as it distracts from looking for a solution to what made me grumpy in the first place. For this reason I’ll aim at being less grumpy this year 😉

Deeper knowledge

You might have noticed some TIL posts appearing here from time to time. I want to do more of these as they help me digging really deep into certain topics, far below the point needed for actually resolving the original issue I had.

This will hopefully also lead me more down the OS, security, and hardware layers again.

Even more writing

Somehow related to that I want to do even more writing than last year. This isn’t limited to my blog, though, as I do quite a lot of documentation related work. Something that I’ve come to enjoy more and more ever since attending my very first WriteTheDocs event in 2015.

I’m not yet sure how I’ll integrate that into my career planning as I’ll probably still be a software developer but perhaps also with something like a “technical-writer light” add-on. For that I’d also love to look around for how formal education is done in that area and at least read some relevant books there.

Becoming an Angel and/or contributing more

Pretty much what I wrote last year. At least for 34C3 now I’m going to have a DECT phone as it arrived last week 😉

And regarding contributing: I want to look around more actively for things I could help out with. This isn’t limited to OSS or related fields but perhaps also some social initiatives. I’m not yet sure what exactly I want to do here, just that I want to do something; and if it’s just donating blood more frequently. Putting this up on my yearly-goals list should help with the motivation.

There are also some other topics that might become relevant over the year but that I don’t really see as primary goals:

• Attending more diverse conferences. This is something I’ve started about two years ago and which will reach a new peak this year with me even skipping DjangoCon Europe.
• More Linux in my life again. This doesn’t mean that I will abandon mayo’s completely but I want to slowly move in a direction where I could actually migrate away from it again 😊

Let’s see in 11.5 months how many of this I will have been able to achieve, but this time I at least want to aim high 😊