Here we go again! 12 months have passed since my last retrospective so it’s my birthday again. Or it’s the other way around?

This year I had many interesting goals and even subgoals and a handy checklist:

  • Writing 20 articles
    • at least 4 about data/ML
  • Deploying 3 new projects
    • Nice to use React, FastAPI, Pytorch and Polars/DuckDB
    • 1 ML project
  • Improving existing projects
    • While Model Trains
      • Reach 250 blog posts
      • Contact all authors
      • Add Estimated Reading time
    • Italian Art Bot
      • Cleaning code and make it open source
      • Fix hashtag
  • Attending 5 tech/data events in person

Sadly, I failed all of them. Let’s analyse how I failed and determine updated goals for the next birthday. Since I have already in mind what I plan for the next year, it is useless to wait for another blog post to outline the new goals.

Writing

That’s the 8th blog post, the first since January. After having reached the goal of 12 posts last time I felt that 20 was a challenging number but for sure manageable. I was wrong. I got stucked on a technical article that should have been an easy one to write and was never published. Then weeks passed without a single draft. At some point I was so behind on the schedule that I just gave up. Thefore this year I commit to come back to one post per month.

Projects

I had some ideas and new ones popped out every now and then but I did not commit to anything. For the next round I want to start and deploy a new project. Shipping one would be better than shipping none.

Regarding the deployed projects I had in mind of polishing Italian Art Bot and improving While Model Trains.

Since in the last months I spent less and less time on Bluesky I almost forgot to work on the art bot. The good thing is that being a bot it does not need my help to keep posting.

On the other hand I worked on While Model Trains for a couple of days but contacting the authors felt like a chore and so I stopped.

I will leave the Italian Art Bot as it is and for While Model Trains I set a harsh deadline: either reach 300 blog posts and write to the authors or shut down the site. I believe that this extreme solution will prompt me to pour more effort in this project.

Events

5 events seemed easy enough. A couple of conferences and three meetups would make it. But except for some events specific to my industry (that don’t qualify) and an online conference I failed to attend to the events I planned. For the next 12 months let’s attend 3 events in person related to Python or ML and be a speaker at one of them.

Considerations

The goals for my next birthday are for sure a downsizing of the last ones, but I hope having something more manageable will avoid giving up on them.

This year, I had failed all the online projects, but I managed to visit a bunch of cool places with Ele: Norway in August, Lapland in March where besides the Northern Lights we met the pieni lapsi, a freaking cool road trip of the US West Coast in April and a short visit to Basilicata in June. We also had to spend a lot of time and energy for our new house. Those are wonderful motivations to have less time for online projects!

And here it’s a checklist that I hope will be all green at my next birthday:

  • Writing 12 articles
  • Deploying a new project
  • Reaching 300 blog posts on While Model Trains (+ contacting the authors) or taking it down
  • Attending 3 tech/data events in person and being a speaker at one of them