www.kaplas.net On a camino of life

New Year's resolution 2015

I’ve decided that 2015 will be the year when I finally start to do stuff instead of just dreaming about it.

My New Year’s resolution for 2015 will be:

  • Begin to write once again. I wrote my own fairytales when I was 7. I learned to create webpages in 1996, and immeadiately wanted to start an online game magazine (that attempt failed though). At the age of 13 I wrote about my school bullying online. A few years later I kept an online diary. And so one… you get the point. For some reason in the last 10 years I haven’t written so much, and I want to find that enthusiasm for words again. I plan to write at least 20 blog posts this year (either here or at my employer’s blog).
  • Talk about JavaScript. For a year or so, I’ve dreamed about talking about my experiences in large-scale JavaScript development. For some reason, so far I’ve just talked about talking. This year I want to start a habit of not just going to conferences, but also of contributing to those. My target will be two talks in 2015.
  • Build up a credible GitHub reputation. My GitHub profile is a mess. Right now there are 16 repositories, out of which none is a well maintained one. The only one getting at least some stars is one I haven’t touched in 1.5 years. Before the end of this year I want all my repositories to fall into one of the following categories:
    • Well maintained and documented
    • Gracefully deprecated, with clear instructions on what one should use/do instead
    • /dev/null
  • Make this homepage/blog one that I’m proud of. I’ve postponed starting of a blog because I always wanted it to look perfect from the day one. That strategy failed, so I finally decided to launch this one as an MVP. Before the end of this year I want to be proud of this: its looks and features, but also the code behind it.

One could say my resolution for 2015 is quite tech-themed, and that is indeed the case. I plan to do a ton of other things too: read a lot of books, spend more time with friends, take more photographs, learn to play mandolin… heck, I even plan to get married this year! All in all I’m certain life will teach me great things in 2015. However I don’t want my New Year’s resolution to be “life your life to the fullest”, because that is what I intend to do anyway. These tech-thingies might sound like small ones, but they are something that have been in my head for way too long; and I just decided that this year I want to more a doer than a dreamer.

Please hold me accountable for keeping this resolution. We’ll check at the end of the year how I fared.

By Jouni Kaplas