I never had a personal journal, it felt too much work to have one or I thought I had nothing interesting to write about. Then last year, while I was at Tiger, I bought a cheap black notebook for 3€ and one day I decided to write down some ideas. It was around the same time I decided to publish this blog.
So far I have just 4 entries on it (I was serious about not using it) dated respectively 2022/09/06, 2022/09/25, 2022/10/09, and 01/01/2023 (it looks like a new year’s resolution page).
I would like to share part of those pages since they are related to the blog. I edited the content for clarity and focus on the topic of this blog.
Journal Pages
2022/09/06
Yesterday night, while I was reading a couple of pages of “The Design of Everyday Things” I came up with some objectives I want to reach by my 30th birthday (in 264 days)!
They are:
- start 3 projects online (1 done)
- publish 30 blog posts (4 done)
3 Projects Online
On 2022/09/04, after months I was working discontinuously on it, and after years of tinkering with the idea of having a blog I finally published my blog at www.nicologiso.com. The other two projects that could be an option to reach my goal are:
- www.italiandestinationwedding.com a service that lists the perfect location for foreigners that want to have a wedding in Italy
- www.whilemodeltrains.com a version of read something great tailored on ML, data and Python. At each refresh a short, medium and long content are proposed to the user.
30 Blog Posts
I published the blog with already 4 posts, that means that I have to publish roughly one post every 10 days or 3 posts per month. For sure it will be a great exercise!”
Reading this notes now it’s clear that:
- I am pretty good at math (264⁄26=10.15).
- 2022 was a year full of friend’s weddings, one of which prompted me to study Finnish.
- I should put some effort into collecting notes and ideas of the books I read so that my future self can take a look at them.
2022/09/25
Basically 20 days flew by and I have not written a single line of a blog post. Well, I already have 2 blog posts. However I wrote some lines of code for a side project. italiandestinationwedding? no! whilemodeltrains? no! a brand new one? of course!
The project is cosaregalo (which gift) a site to help you find a gift for any person for any occasion. It could generate revenues through affiliated links. We thought is a genius and novel idea. But guess what? There are at least two competitors.
The page goes on describing the competitors and what I tried to implement, but basically after a couple of days in which I was trying to implement a sort of front end I ditched it.
2023/01/01
Not at all an entry to start a new habit. The N (N=3 on the paper, and N=2 here) big goals for my 30th birthday need a lot of work in the next 5 months (and for sure some will not be reached).
Number of posts published: 5 out of 30. The last one of which took 2 months and was published yesterday. It helped to talk at NormConf!
Projects online: 1 out of 3. I should think about whilemodeltrains.com
Then there is a description of fitness goals related to fitness but I can assure you I did not reach them.
Actual Status & Next Goals
Given that over one month has passed since my 30th birthday I can draw some conclusions on the results and what to do in the next months.
Blog Posts
This is my 7th blog post. I completely missed my goal. I thought it would be easier to produce other 20ish pieces since I had a backlog of over 30. Not having a clear agenda of what to publish and when did not help. Between the first draft and when I publish the piece it takes at least two weeks (for instance this piece took roughly 5 weeks).
On the other hand a piece every 10 days for my current standard is probably a too ambitious goal. I think one piece per month is more realistic but still challenging.
Online Projects
You are reading this post so the blog is still online. One.
What about italiandestinationwedding? After trying to lay out a plan with Elena and coming up with a landing page with carrd.co we stopped on it. But in the meanwhile we decided it was time for our wedding ❤️.
And guess what we need to give all the information to our guests? A nice site! It is online? Yes. It is a Project? Technically yes. I bought the domain and we built a pretty good site using Google Sites (you have to understand when it is not necessary to write code!). Moreover, I think in the future we can develop a side project with the cool domain name. So it’s a Two.
What about whilemodeltrains.com? Since the first entry on my paper notes I collected blog posts about data, ML and AI that captured my interest in a Google sheets. Then mid May I realized I had like a month left before my birthday and I had 3 evenings with no plans so I jumped into the project. In those 3 nights I was able to implement the basics, then I took some hours a week to refine the frontend. Just a couple of hours before my birthday I deployed. So it’s a Three and goal reached!
What are the plans for next year about online projects?
- Keep working on this blog with the realistic goal of 12 posts in the next year.
- Work on whilemodeltrains.com adding new features (I have already in mind a bunch of them) and new posts, plus let people know is live.
- Launch other 3 projects to expand my technical toolbox and build something cool!
I hope that writing and publishing these goals will give me some accountability and help keep up with them.
Let’s see how many of those I will reach in the next 11 months!