2021 has been a tough year. I’ve been absent from working on my own personal projects during the later half of 2021. This has mainly been due to other family members' health issues and dealing with the aftermath. 2021 has been hard on a lot of people given the current COVID-19 circumstances. Anyway, I thought I’d look back and see how I went with sticking with my original goals and plans for 2021.
- Spend more time on the piano
I can definitely tick this one off, especially in the later half of the year with my new ‘work from home’ job as I don’t have to spend an hour each way travelling to and from work. This has freed up a little bit of time time in the late afternoon where I can sit on the piano and unwind after a day of work. It’s great stress relief and it has made me a better player overall.
- Gain a certification for work. (Kubernetes or some other linux certification)
This one I didn’t end up doing. Mainly because I got a new job that didn’t require the certification so as a result I ended up focusing my time elsewhere. Now that I know the lay of the land of the new role I can look at getting some different certifications next year (more on that later).
- Update this blog more often than just once a year
I have improved the number of blog posts done this year. I’ve even started to retro-fit in some old blog posts for some milestones that I want to record in the past. I would credit the extra and ease of blog posting to using a blog automation workflow to automatically update my website when I go a git push to my private github repository. Switching to Hugo has also made it a lot easier to update my blog on the fly when I have a moment as it is just text. Going forward however I need to work out the best way to add and upload images to my blog posts (no one wants to sit and read a wall of text).
- Finish a few of my outstanding projects (not leave them half done and neglected)
This is still a problem for me - Still too many unfinished projects to be done. Part of the problem is lack of time. This year has been tough to dedicate time to some of my projects. The good news is that there is no time limit or deadline, so technically it isn’t unfinished, its a ‘work in progress’ :)
- Have more fun!
I’ve definitely have ticked this one. I’ve been doing a lot of things that I haven’t blogged yet. 3D printing, more electronics, forth coding, game programming, interactive fiction, and general code exploring with some new languages to try out (rust, lua). There has even been some time to do a bit of star gazing with my telescope.
So what will 2022 bring? Who knows.