Rather than write down New Year's resolutions, I tend to think of general areas to improve over the following year. Unfortunately, I'm left without any concrete, measurable improvements, so I'm going to take a different approach for 2015. Here are two specific resolutions I'm gunning for over the next 12 months.
Anfänger Deutsch
For the past two months, I've been learning German via Duolingo and Memrise. I currently know roughly 500 words and I'll write more about my motivation and techniques in a future post. My overall goal is to become a competent beginner German speaker by the end of 2015.
For a concrete task, I commit to learning 125 words per month, which means I'll be on the same level as a Kindergarten student according to this paper. By the way, German "die Kinder" means "the children".
Create More
It feels so good to binge watch House of Cards, read good novels, and plow through Twitter. Mikael Cho provides a good summary here. As a software engineer, I'm lucky that my biggest hobby is also my line of work and it's a hobby with easily-shared output.
To deliver on this goal, I'm going to write at least one article here each month for the next 12 months. I have a backlog of posts on startups, data science, and half-baked side projects. Committing to monthly writing will force me to put pen to paper with these ideas. If I have nothing to say for a month, then I know I'm not following through on this goal.
Also, thanks to design inspiration from my roommate Ian Storm Taylor and his open source Metalsmith for powering this blog. Lots of improvements to make to the site :-) Enjoy the New Year's Eve celebrations!