The year of connection, I've decided on the theme for next year.
Connection
First off, how did the year of creating go?
In exploring this years theme I managed to create a personal CRM, starting with
a personal database, expanded functionality with Django
and a web interface.
I highly recommend looking at Monica for a complete,
maintained project.
I've also tinkered with Common Lisp during the summer, published only 10 posts since choosing the theme, there is still time! My list of unpublished has increased and the frequency of note taking increased too.
This has helped as I moved to learning Clojure and ClojureScript for real world projects, learning React via ClojureScript's Reagent and Re-frame libraries.
During the summer I managed to read more than a handful of books. Late spring saw me invest more time into reading, learning, discovering interesting things on the internet.
I hoped to have written 100 tweets in 3 months.
That didn't last long.
I committed to writing more.
I set my yearly theme to creating. Whilst I barely managed to publish a blog post one every month it wasn't a goal to stick to a regime. Now, of course, writing every morning, I don't need to be as conscious of what I type, the content is for my eyes only. In the pile of offhand morning pages I have no doubt there will be something I feel compelled to put up.
I emailed an internet stranger for the first time
This was an important turning point in the year, realizing the feel free to email wasn't just a modern curtsy, we do want to hear from our audience and experts are willing to reply to your queries. Being online is far more rewarding when you interact with people on the other end of the article.
Less lurking, more posting next year.
What else?
First internship. It was great working with E2E; working on adding features to their online engineering network. The founders are incredible leaders and I have no doubt they will have a successful career ahead of them.
Travel. I was lucky enough to survive the first exodus of exchange
students across Hong Kong. I spent the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 in
Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. The remaining time in Hong Kong was quiet,
a drop in tourists and familiar faces hadn't returned over the holiday.
My intentional visit home mid March turned into an unexpected end to my time
in Hong Kong. Even though I miss the excitement of travelling, I made the most
of my time.
In my personal life I finally had the courage to ask someone out. In the five months I have been with her I have learnt how to be more forgiving, not to assume the worst possible outcome and realizing that life is not forever so enjoy the present. Earlier this year I concluded that regrets are something I do not have, only lessons to be learnt from.
2020 wasn't that bad, could've been worse.
Hello 2021. More on that later.