It’s time for the retrospective for my 33rd birthday goals. Since good things come in three (30th, 31st and 32nd) , I don’t know what to think about this 4th retrospective. Anyway, Where did we left?
- 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
I thought that cut on the goals from 20 to 12 articles, from 3 to 1 projects and from 5 to 3 events would make them more manageable. I was wrong.
Writing
I managed to write just 4 blog posts (including this one). That sucks. It’s not that I have not enough ideas or I can’t turn them into drafts. The issue is that those drafts stay stacked too long in a Google doc or on a new feature branch. For instance for my latest post, the initial version is dated something around beginning of March and I managed to ship it just last week. I have to focus on reducing the time from draft to publish. Therefore I commit again to writing 12 articles in a year, or even better publishing at least one blog post per month.
Projects
Well, it was a really bad year for side projects. I did not even start on thinking of a new one. Or actually during Christmas break I thought about implementing a timer app that could run on a Raspberry, since we got rid of Alexa, but I got stuck in the Upside Down so I barely made a commit.
Not for finding excuses, but having coding assistants so powerful that makes some projects a couple hours of work and prompts away to be released made loose the appeal. But I guess that I should follow Vicki’s advice.
Talking about deployed projects, While Model Trains laid forgotten in its domain and therefore I have to shut it down as I said last year. It has been interesting to build it (when coders were still better at writing lines of code than LLMs), I don’t exclude a revamping in the future but for now it’s time to close it.
And for Italian Art Bot, I basically got off of Bluesky. I guess its premises are good but the community was a little small, or my content not good enough and I ended up not logging in. Looking at the positive side that is less time on social networks. Anyway after almost 2 years the bot ran out of paintings and I received notifications of errors. Just resetting the publishing state of the paintings extended of another couple years the project. Hurray!
Events
Nil, zero, nada. I completely failed. By the way I submitted a couple of talks at PyConItalia but luckily for the community there was better material!
All the rest
The year between my 31st and 32nd birthdays was full of exciting trips, the last 12 months we definitely reduced it. We just had a week in Calabria for a wedding plus some days of relax at the beach. That is because we had a lot of going on: moving in our new house and preparing for an even crazier journey: the preparation lasted 9 months and it officially started this spring with the birth of our baby.
34th year goals
All thing considered I don’t think I will have much time this year to attend events and I don’t have side projects in mind (but who knows? Maybe I will come up with something). Therefore I have just one goal: PUBLISHING ONE BLOG POST PER MONTH! But since I really want to reach this goal let’s make some real pressure on it. If by the end of the month I don’t publish anything, I will buy a 50€ Zalando gift card for Ele.
Let’s see how many post I will publish (and how many pair of shoes she will buy)!