A reflection on new years resolutions

This year has been one of the most exciting years of my life. For the first time in my adult life, I didn’t set up unrealistic new years resolutions. Instead, it was easy for me to look at the things my wife and I had pretty much planned for the year ahead. Then, everything personally and professionally was evaluated based on how close it got us to achieving the plan.

Running 1000km this year is a better plan than getting in shape. So every week, I evaluated whether I had done enough to get there and then readjust. And I got 980km, but that’s better than I have done in the past.

Another example of this, related to professional goals, I wanted to improve my position at work, and I also wanted to re-look at the sort of work I was taking in as side projects. I didn’t have a grand plan except to add tests for everything I wrote. I picked up PHPUnit and Jest, which helped me a lot as I was working on my trial project at Automattic. And I started picking up projects outside my comfort zone. That allowed me to develop skills with infrastructure, Cloud, and DevOps. And I was able to pass my AWS developer certification. I have tried picking up Cloud before, and I felt stuck in tutorial limbo for a while. Challenging myself to complete real projects was more valuable than paying for another Coursera course.

What’s to come?

I am not sure; I am starting a new job in a month, and I am super excited. I want to do well, and I want to contribute more. I am maintaining a few projects within the Drupal community. As I join the Woocommerce team at Automattic, I want to get more involved with the WordPress Community. An excellent place to start will be to publish my WooCommerce stellr-API plugin on wp.org.

And the goal this year is again to run 1000 km on the road. And I am building strength up to 100 push-ups a day, starting with 20 push-ups a day. I will make the tracker public on my notion.

Again make sure your goals are clear and realistic, and actionable.

Let’s get it.