A little late to the game here since we’re already over two weeks into 2020, but I wanted to give a brief overview of what happened in 2019. It was a bit of an unusual year for me, but altogether positive. I got a job in January after over six months of searching, and it has been incredible. As a result, I feel like I’ve been able to settle into more of a routine than at any other point in the last five years. I went to Europe with my partner and had a great time traveling with her, and we visited one of my best and oldest friends in France, which was awesome. I fractured a bone for the first time ever while playing basketball, which was not fun at all, though I’m close to being fully healed. There some great times and a tougher times that, while I’d prefer to forget them, are learning experiences.
Enough vague anecdotes and let’s evaluate how I did on my goals of 2019. The short answer: not well! The longer answer is that despite not completing several of my stated goals, I did make personal progress in other ways that was substantial. I completely flopped in the “Data Science/Statistics” category of my goals, and came close to being shut out of my “Basketball” set of goals, too. I discussed basketball philosophy through analytics and its path, which managed to be the only thing I wrote about my favorite sport.
The only category that saw even rudimentary levels of success was “Lifestyle/Other”, and so I will go into a modicum of depth for it:
- I finished over ten books and more than five non-fiction books, hitting both reading goals. I really enjoyed most of the books I read this year, which included the last few Dark Tower books, Dune I, The Overstory, Sons & Lovers, Fooled by Randomness, and The Jungle Effect, among others.
- I joined a gym, though it does not have a basketball court, let alone a way to dead lift or squat with free weights (and I need to use the membership much more, anyhow).
- I haven’t eliminated single use plastic from my life, but I’ve certainly gotten better about it through the use of reusable bags and water bottles, as well as being gifted a reusable mug and straw.
- I have gotten a bit better at cooking and show more often at my local market where I can get fresh ingredients without all the plastic packaging.
- My on-again, off-again relationship with Duolingo continued that way this year. We are currently on and making slow progress to understanding più italiano.
That’s a lot of failure if you look at the year through that lens. But if it was a success in spite of these failures, something must have gone well, right? And several things definitely went well, chief among them my job. My team has been incredible as we’ve grown and it has given me a chance to grow, flex my skills, and dive into various areas of the business. It’s helped me learn where I want to direct my career as well as more comfortable and confident in the nitty gritty parts of my job, which has in turn helped me in my personal projects. I got a lot better at general coding in Python and know more about best practices, how to abstract code away in an appropriate manner, and handling a package.
One of my favorite pieces of the year has been learning more about how to leverage Github issues. I have never been great at creating project plans and sticking to them. When I tried in the past, I either got absurd laundry list of tasks or only had the big idea and failed to create checkpoints of any sort. Neither of those worked well, and I believe that contributed to some of my inability to produce work despite having (what I believe to be) decent to good ideas. I’m super excited to try and put some of this new planning to use, regardless of if it is with issues in Github or some other personal planning tool. I still have some things to learn about not overextending myself and saying no so that I allow myself enough time to do what I want to do, but I’m making steps in the right direction.
I learned a lot in 2019, both about myself and more technical things, which excites me as I look forward to 2020. I hope to have a companion piece to this one with my goals for this year out soon, which will be as ambitious as ever so I can build on what I’ve learned as much as possible. The world is vast and while I will never be able to tackle as much of it as I want to, it’s about making progress and getting a little bit better each day. Learning something new, regardless of the source (and try to share more of those lessons right here!)
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