Year 2015 was the year of travel.

In the resolution for 2015 we only planned for Iceland and the coast of Italy. But now I wouldn’t even be able to count the number of countries we visited in just one year with our little daughter.

I somehow managed to take short vacations almost every warm month. For that I had to work some additional time, but extra effort was definitely worth the experience. Outside of Schengen Area we went to Turkey and Israel and in Schengen Area itself there are only two countries left where we haven’t been.

I was so much engaged in enjoying my life that didn’t progress that well with my professional life, but on the other hand I expanded and improved some other areas of my life by travelling, investing and doing sports.

Now let’s go through the resolution list:

Travel to Iceland

It was the greatest trip of all we had so far. My wife wrote series of blog posts on this trip (in Ukrainian).

Travel the coast of Italy and do many other car trips

Italy was a week and two days car trip from Austria, but besides of this one we had two Nordic car trips. We drove all the way to Finland from Austria and also took a hired car from Germany to Sweden. I legally set my speed record of 220km/h. I drove two absolutely different car types in Iceland and Israel – two absolutely opposite countries by weather and security situation. Contrast between these two countries is just staggering. You cannot appreciate it unless you visit those two.

Improve German by attending at least 1 course

Attended two courses and hopefully learned something.

Improve English fluency and vocabulary by spending more time on learning words from read books

Subjective, but I guess there is some improvement. I indeed spent some time after reading books on vocabulary. Next big milestone should be my accent.

Read 4 sci-fi books

Done. Enjoyed some.

Read 13 software engineering books

Partially done. Unfortunately, I started way too many of them and haven’t finished reading. Notable mention would be “C# in Depth”.

Read 13 investment books

All done. This was my list. Will have a separate review list, maybe with ratings.

Start project with potential to make money

Not really. Had few friendly offers to work on things together, but I didn’t like any.

Do programming in other languages than C# or JavaScript

Total fail. I tried to start learning F# and didn’t get it past few simple “hello world” apps.

Take part in at least one programming contest

SRM at TopCoder, but this probably cannot be considered a “contest”, therefore fail.

Visit at least one conference (even small one)

Visited .concat() in Salzburg

Write at least 26 blog posts

17 blog post written.

Increase community visibility by contributing more on github, tweeting, commenting on blogs

Subjective, but fail.

Improve health by exercising and attending swimming pool for at least 1 month

Rather success than fail. I didn’t attend swimming pool, but I ran for couple of months and will start again when it gets warmer.

Make at least 2015 euro profit on new investments in 2015

Success and fail at the same very time. I didn’t set this goal properly as I didn’t know much about investing. I was up and down as much few times during the past volatile year. I have some very small realized profit, but I’m not so keen on being active investor as it only makes brokers rich. Will tell more when it gets to it.

It is a bit late to say, but I wish you all

HAPPY NEW YEAR!