Goals for 2021

I previously wrote about 2020 and I found that reflecting about the chaos of this past year was rather cathartic for me.

While I feel lucky to have endured the pandemic without contracting COVID or suffering job losses, it has been quite isolating. I know that I'm not alone in feeling that and we're all getting through this in our own ways. Regardless, I found that writing my thoughts out loud was helpful, so I suppose I'll continue writing for now.

Since I'm going to try to write more I figured I'd share some of my goals for the new year; so, here are my foolish high-level goals in some unknown order:

1. Be a better husband
2. Talk less, listen more
3. Cook more intentionally
4. Speak more intentionally
5. Help others more effectively
6. Write at least 2x per month
7. Exercise ~5x per week

I hope I'm able to accomplish these. With the exclusion of the last two, these goals aren't particularly measurable (I'll probably find a way to measure them) but I hope to make a good effort. I hope to look back here and attempt to hold myself accountable. Maybe I'll provide an update in June, who knows.

More specific goals that I have that are much more technical in nature are:

• Connecting Django Rest Framework (DRF) and React while handling data and localization complexities;
• Deploying a React Native application to both app stores;
• Putting in some more hours on Airflow / Cloud Composer;
• Learning how to train my recommendation models on Kubernetes.

These will be interesting and I'm making progress on DRF and React but I still have quite a bit of work to do.

Hopefully this year will be better, I'm optimistic about it.