2021

2021 was the year we had high hopes for. It was also the year when so many of these hopes have been crushed. Other than COVID, just here in BC, Canada where I live, we had the record high temperatures burning entire towns to ashes and floods of the century cutting us from the rest of Canada. I believe the year like that raised awareness of so many critical issues of the contemporary world, like climate change, politicization, mental health, etc, but most of all it forced us to reevaluate life priorities and think twice about what is important in our lives.

In the year 2021 I spent more time with my family, focused on health and tried to live a good life despite things getting hard mentally at times.

2021 In Numbers

I worked out 365 days last year, including 148 rock climbing gym visits (my climbing stuff), 78 runs, 87 hours of weight training, and many other activies, averaging 55 hours a month; set some new personal records like 20 pullups and sub-50min 10k, briefly reached 56 VO2max and 68kg of weight but retreated on the last two; read 20+ books, many of which are technical but also included all 7 Harry Potter books I read with my daughter. Learned some C++ and subjectively did well at work. I straightened my teeth, tried real rock climbing and pole calisthenics. Invested 20% more money in 2021 than I did in 2020 and my early retierement aspirations at age 41 are now more realistic than ever. I failed to quit coffee but successfully reduced it consumption. I also failed to write enough on this blog and failed to inspire people as I might have done years ago.

Complete list of all items from 2021

1. Read all 7 Harry Potter books to my 7y old daughter. That’s 199 chapters making it roughly 4 chapters (65p) per week.
   1. DONE. I read few first books myself and then my daughter (8) get so much interested she started to read on her own.
2. Teach my daughter basics of programming. Snake game seems to be a good candidate for a year’s project goal.
   1. We had two sessions with my daugher where we created a simple “food” for the snake and are drawing grid. I consider this a failure as this isn’t what I imagined.
3. Teach my 4y old son basics of skiing. Let’s see how many times I can take him out skiing.
   1. Took him 3 times in total (second season – yeap he tries skies at age 3 for the first time). He alreay learned to ski “pizza”-style. I guess I’m better teacher this time. I used ski-wedges (rubber string to keep front of the skies together) and I’m not making the mistake of holding him so that he learns to keep the balance right from the beginning. I should probably classify this as failure, even there was some progress.
4. Travel outside of Canada and have a boring beach vacation. Fingers crossed.
   1. :(
5. Have two camping road-trips (long weekends count, but a week+ would be awesome).
   1. DONE. One weekend long and another almost a week long, though with hotels in between.
6. Set new personal running records (considerations 1K, 1Mile, 5K, 10K and Half-Marathon). Consider running a Marathon (that’s not a healthy distance imo, but people keep asking me if I ran it and I cannot say yes… ogh…).
   1. DONE. 79 runs. Set new 5K – 22:43, 10K – 49:49 PR. I will consider this done.
7. Improve VO2Max to 60 ml/(kg·min) from the current 54. This means I will have to specifically and properly train. Just running 100 times won’t cut it. In combination with my other goals of gaining muscle weight this goal becomes even more difficult.
   1. Max achieved 56. It seem to be unrealistic to achieve 60 for me due to biological limitations and my age or it would take a lot more dedication for me, which I’m not ready to do.
8. Try out at least one other sport activity. Considerations are: mountain biking, martial arts, archery, whatever, anything counts as long as I try it out.
   1. DONE. Tried real rock climbing, kickboxing, and pole-calisthenics, bought a bike and biked super-easy mountain trails.
9. Learn free handstands and snap some cool pics for the next year’s post.
   1. Failed. I made some progress, like I can do low control handstand for few seconds, but that’s not what I wanted.
10. Strength train for 100 hours inclining towards climbing specifics (finger strength; pull-ups; core). Set new personal pullup (19+) and pushup (102+) records.
    1. DONE. Way over 100 hours. I calculated > 83hours of separate strength training time, plus there would be maybe another 50 or more of those coming from my climbing activies. New pull-ups PR 20. Didn’t do the pushups.
11. Gain 5kg of pure muscles (70kg, BMI of 22, fat 10-13%) and post a shirtless comparing pic.
    1. Max achieved was 68. I’m 10.3% body fat. I will delay posting a comparison pic to the next year, though if you are super curious there is some arms stuff in strava.
12. See how far I can get in climbing. Target sending one V8 (7B Font, HEX-5/6) bouldering problem. If this doesn’t say you anything, it is a super-ambitious goal as I can currently do V3s, some V4s. Normally V8 requires years of training and lots of strength. Likely to fail. Shoot for the starts.
    1. DONE (kind-off): rock-climbed 148 times. Sent a couple of HEX-5 (V6-V8, probably these were 7A and not 7B).
13. Continue sleeping full 8.5 hours.
    1. DONE. Based on garmin data I kept sleeping 8.5+ hours for entire year with few exceptions.
14. Straighten my teeth to a perfect arch.
    1. DONE. My teeth are straight now. I’m still wearing last sets of aligners and then will need to wear retainers for some time, but the work is done! Smily pictures are coming next year.
15. Further reduce coffee. Cold turkey is a real option this year.
    1. Had 2 months with 0 coffee intake (Jan, Feb), and many months with few coffees. By the end of the year I’m basically back to daily sonsumption. This means I’m a coffee addict, but a controlled one, or is this not a defintion of an addict? hm..
16. Build a strong disciplined morning routine, that includes among other things waking within 5 minutes of alarm going off, drinking full glass of water, short meditation and a full breakfast.
    1. Big failure. No real discipline, though I do have some kind of routine. I stopped having an alarm. Yeap. I do not have any alarms set and this makes me feel great.
17. Write 10 blog posts, of which at least 5 are of a technical content.
    1. Failure.
18. Listen to/read 10 books, of which at least 5 are technical/career ones. (Harry Potter ones don’t count).
    1. Books done:
       “Time Smart”
       “Effective C++”
       “Effective Modern C++” (partially)
       “Change by Design”
       “The Manager’s Path”
       “The Body Keeps the Score”
       “Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy”
       “Sapiens”
       “The Art of Thinking Clearly”
       “The great mental models: Vol 2”
       “The Ride of a Lifetime”
       “The Pragmatic Programmer” (relisten)
       “Finding Flow”
       and few other funny ones I’m not brave enough to post here
       
19. Solve 100 leet code problems (min 10 hard; min 50 medium). Got to keep myself in a good shape, right?
    1. Solved 44 problems. Not much. (total lifetime solved 565)
20. Deliberately work on loosing my eastern European accent for at least 10 hours. A course with a real teacher would be great.
    1. Failed. Was close to having scheduled classes.
21. Create a monetizable content and earn 1$. This can be a course on programming, an e-book, a problem solving tutorial, anything really.
    1. Failed. Lack of specificity and dedication to this one.
22. Become fully proficient in one more programming laguage.
    1. DONE: Gained C/C++ readability badge at work. It kind of means Google now trusts me to write C++ code :) I also finally fill more-or-less comfortable in this language.
23. Learn Linux. I use Linux every day at work, but I’m limited to basic things and have never deliberately tried to understand this operating system or become proficient in it.
    1. Failed. Linux is now my main non-work operating system. Though still not what I meant.
24. Learn to complete all work within strickly 8 working hours. Less of stretching of time, less of inefficiencies, less of distruction, more discipline. Efficiency. Time is our most precious resource.
    1. Mar: March was probably one of the most efficient months for me at Google so far.
       Feb: I’m tracking my time super-precisely and can tell there is close to 0 of time-wasters (news, social, etc) during work hours.
       Oct: This goes “oke-ish”.
       Calling this a success even I don’t feel I work enough. My employer seems to be happy, though.
25. Better track money. I’ve been tracking money since my first paychecks, but in the year 2020 I lost my routines so need to reestablish them.
    1. Mar: on track.
       Feb: Back on track. Rewamped my “balance and net worth” sheets.
       Oct: Not sharing too much but I have a hold on money tracking and investing. It is just maybe I can make more if, say, I worked in US or something.
       
26. Make or lose 1000$ in a risky investment. Failures are learning experiences.
    1. DONE: I have some crypto ETFs that jumped like hell and I didn’t budge. Jumps were X*1000 so I’m covered for this goal. I have some confidence in risk tollerance now. And no, I do not believe in all this crypto hype.
27. Invest 20% more money in 2021 than in 2020.
    1. DONE.
28. Create a painting and/or a drawing. I already know some basics. Just want to do something to really like.
    1. Failed. I just didn’t feel like doing this for entire year. This has something to do with the feelings.

Learning from 2021

Last year taught me that seemingly “impossible” things are possible as long as you are truly focused on them (by the example of having a physical activity every day), and at the same time many possible things are left undone because they lacked dedication, proper tracking and habit forming aspects to it or were just wishful thinking.

2022 Plan

I’ve been writing new year resolutions since 2010 and my success rate has increased progressively.

Process

Quantify. Wishful untracked resolutions don’t work. Instead of creating a resolution like “improve financial situation”, which is a good idea, try to understand why you want it, what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve it and then crunch the numbers and compile a list of quantifiable, prioritized and trackable results you want to see by the end of the year (ie. “max out pension plan”, “buy asset G”, “invest % into Y”, “get salary hike by doing X”).

Track your list. I am thankful to my friends who kept tabs on me (AnAustrian :) ) because this allowed me to be accountable. I propose a monthly routine when you go back to your plan, update the status and re-review the validity of the goals. I personally do this via google sheets.

Another modification I’ve made to my resolutions is that I set success criteria which usually is 50% of the list, and believe me it is enough to keep myself sweating for the entire year.

Plan

For the year 2022 I have a list of 70+ items. I know, I know, having too many items doesn’t sound like a smart idea, but there is merit to it. The list I created is categorized into health, family, career, life quality, etc and then each of the items was given a priority on a scale 0-4 (0 = highest; 4 = lowest). I ended up with just 10 items I think are truly important. Success criteria is to complete highest priority items but have a possibility to replace some of them with multiple lower priority items. (More exactly, I want to collect 10 points, where P0=1point, P1=1/2, P2=1/3, P3=1/4, P4=1/5)

This year my private goals are mixed with career and all other goals into a single spreadsheet, but in order to share the list I masked some of the items that I’m not comfortable sharing. The below list is not set in stone, but it will be my go-to list any time of the year, any time of the day.

The Why

Now the above maniacally long list doesn’t tell the whole story. “The why” is often much more important than what or how. Each of the categories has its intent and it is a fairly simple long term directional objective:

Happy New Year

May the new 2022 year be the year of great achievements for you!

Share your goals and let’s keep each other accountable.

My life is boring. Unlike many previous years, when I either moved a country, got a newborn, changed a job, or travelled tons of countries, 2019 turned out to be unremarkable in so many respects. I do not know if this could be because of not having a clear plan as I usually do (see my reports and resolutions for past years here) or if this is because of becoming older and less ambitious. Hoping my 2020 is going to be way more exciting and positive! Wishing you a very happy new year!

2019 Recap

Let me try to pull out at least something of notice for 2019:

• Technically travelled around the globe in 6 days (airports: YVR->HKG->SIN->BLR->HYD->STV->BOM->LHR->YVR). Not enjoyable at all
• Bungee jumped (pic above)
• Leaned to solve Rubik’s Cube (personal record 2m41s)
• Visited real home (Ukraine) and previous home (Austria)
• Drove from Vancouver all the way to Death Valley and back
• Ran 52 times with total distance 311 km
• Worked out 107 times
• Gained 7kg. Yes, on purpose and it wasn’t any easy as I’m super skinny guy with insanely high metabolism, yet after this my BMI is still < 20
• Set some personal records (half-marathon in 2h00m, 10km in 52:41, 1km in 3:50, longest run at 33km, pushups in a single set 101, pushups in single workout session 600, grouse grind of 2830 stairs in 46min)
• Listened to/read 24 books
• Managed to get at up around 5AM-6AM for couple of months and gave up
• Solved 282 leet code problems and haven’t given up yet
• Wrote 6 blog posts (shame!)
• I didn’t use Facebook, rarely used Twitter, watched only 2-3 TV series, went to cinema only once and this is all good (probably) except I cannot join all of the conversations
• “O, Canada!” is welcoming. I’m now a permanent resident and feel myself more like at home than I felt in Austria

Bad things:

• Created an instagram account and that thingy eats some of my time
• Cannot get up even within 1 hour after alarm going off
• Made very few friends (too few in fact)
• Visited 0 conferences
• Contributed to 0 open source projects
• Learned 0 new programming languages
• Learned 0 new frameworks
• Spoke at 0 events
• Got 0 promotions
• 0 interviews given [Edit 5Jan2020: from contact to offer or rejection]
• Can come up with N+1 things with number 0 and where I would want it to be > 0
• … you got the idea

Can have anything; cannot have everything

While some of those good things might seem interesting or even inspiring and some of bad things might not sound too horrible, I hate to celebrate. Problem is that I do not feel any progress in this year whatsoever. One intriguing thing that I came to realize is that I do have resources (relative youth, great health, some money) allowing me to do so many things, but sadly I cannot do everything I want and, maybe, I shouldn’t. Let me bring a quote from one of the books I read recently:

… you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

This is so sad! We don’t know what is right in this life and there is no “start over” button, at the same time “game over” is coming for everyone.

2020 Plan

So what’s up for the year 2020? A change! I don’t want any more children as two are already giving me hard time, but I don’t mind changing something about my work, learning something new and exciting, traveling somewhere exotic, or coming up with some fun that makes me and others happy.

Motto for the year 2020: “Break the records!“

Last updated 1 April 2020

1. [Edit 29Jan2020] Spend more quality time with kids in 2020 than in 2019 as measured by wife’s opinion
2. Travel a distant country (candidate New Zealand, other places count) Changed thsi to be a long 2+ weeks roadtrip.
   COMPLETED
3. Write 24 blog posts, of which at least 12 are of a technical content
4. Listen to/read 24 books
5. Run 52 times and take part in a race (candidate VanSunRun on 19April)
   COMPLETED
6. Ski 12 days (night skiing after work counts)
   COMPLETED
7. Improve swimming by going 10 times to swimming pool (consider a course)
8. Learn to walk on hands
9. Work out 104 hours
10. Gain another 7kg of pure muscles (70kg, BMI of 22, fat 11-15%)
11. Drive a racing car
    COMPLETED
12. Go indoor climbing 10+ times, learn to do 5.10+ YDS and V4+ Hueco (USA)
    COMPLETED
13. Some adrenaline rush thingy (skydive, bungee, paraglide, etc)
14. Learn a programming language (tiny project counts ~3 blog posts)
15. (re)-introduce myself to Machine Learning (basics + TensorFlow)
16. Sleep 8-9 hours, but learn to get up with damn alarm instantly (15 sec). This one might be the most challenging as this is a horrible habit of mine (hitting “snooze” for 2 hours)
17. Limit read-only social media activities to 2 hours a week (scrolling Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/LinkedIn, excl. posting and messaging people) as to produce instead of consuming
18. Meaningful work related change
    COMPLETED
19. Solve 100 leet code problems
20. Visit a tech conference and/or some tech meetup(s) (2+ counts)
21. Quit regular money wasters (going out for lunch, 5$ coffee, etc, max 1 a week or 52 in a year)
22. Reduce coffee (max 1 per day); best if I could go cold turkey
23. Increase focus at work (track screen time and distractions)
24. Invest 20% more money in 2020 than in 2019
    COMPLETED

Ok, these are 24 items. The goal is to complete at least 12 of them. Obviously some are more important and challenging like work related change and some are way less important and easy like learning to walk on hands, but, as a matter of fact, 92% of new year resolutions fail, so promising to do >=50% of the list might be a reasonable approach.

Happy New Year!

Dear reader, what’s your plan for the year 2020? Do you have one? Is it achievable and specific enough so you can keep yourself accountable?

Again, not to break the tradition, here is my resolution for the year 2017.

1. Start getting up at 6
2. Run 40+ times; hike 3+ times
3. Lead a project at work to success
4. Teach dauther basics of  skiing and reading
5. Travel Balkan countries
6. Quit coffee and social media
7. Read 24 books
8. Write 24 blog posts
9. Win a T-Shirt
10. Make github green
11. Learn something
12. Buy something
13. Enjoy the life

This list is rather cryptic and unconventional. As they say, it is not that “SMART” and I agree. Fortunately for me, I’m the boss of my life and this is how I would like to put it for this year.

The road on a picture below appears to be smooth and straight. There are some shadows and lots of light in the end. Also, I don’t know if the road is still there where the light is, do you?

It is quite late into the year 2017, but I decided not to break the tradition and write my yearly report.

When I planned my 2013 I had “the best thing that could happen” listed as I knew my daughter was coming. When I was planning for 2016 I didn’t expect to have a second child.

But here I am with my son just some minutes after he was born on 16th of December 2016.

I’m really glad and looking forward to see him grow and build his own life.

Except of this main and life changing event, few other things happened: we have moved to slightly bigger apartment, and I made some progress in my career (more on that sometime later).

Here is the list of planned things and their completion rates:

1. Run 2-3 times a week for at least 5 warm months.
   100% I ran 50+ times totaling 320km. Here is a nice post from me that some people find inspiring.
2. Make start of the day more healthy and productive. Ideal scenario would be: get up at 05:55AM, drink glass of water, do exercises for 15-30 min, shower, some important task and/or planning for the day, breakfast, work… But I will consider this item achieved if I start doing exercises regularly even if it is only 2 times a week just for 10 minutes.
   15% This is too difficult for me, though I managed to be at work around 7:30 for two months or so and do exercises sporadically.
3. Travel to the UK, Norway, sea side country, and do a car trip somewhere nice.
   100% Visited UK, Ireland, Georgia, Croatia and few other Austria bordering countries for shorter trips. We had to cancel Norway because of the the wife’s pregnancy, but it was equally compensated by a trip to Ireland and adventures mountains in Georgia.
4. Spend one hour every day with my daughter playing and learning things.
   50% I’m bit shocked that I had this in a plan. Spending quality time with children is important and should be done without saying, but we neglect it too often.
5. Count not more than 12 weekends in a year when we didn’t go out to do some activities.
   50% I kept track of these “bad” weekends and there are definitely more than 12, though, in part, it was caused by unforeseen circumstances.
6. Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.
   15% Didn’t work out. Maybe very few things from guys at work.
7. Read at least 6 technical books.
   65% 3 books read. 2 half read.
8. Watch at least 12 pluralsight courses.
   100% Watched more than that but probably benefited from few.
9. Write a simple stock analyzing web site. It could have any set of features, point is to get something interesting running.
   0% I don’t count retarded attempt on it.
10. Write any simple useful open source tool. I have WCF related idea in mind.
    0% Unless this git bash script counts.
11. Learn at least two web technologies. I have NodeJS and AngularJS in mind at the moment.
    25% No activities on NodeJs, though some on Angular. More are coming in this year.
12. Share knowledge more actively. Minimum would be to write 24 blog posts, answer 12 questions on SO, help few people online.
    50% 16 posts. 7 SO answers. Few comments on blogs.
13. Acquire B1 German certificate, attend German course, finish entire German Duolingo tree.
    100% All of these completed. This also allowed me to acquire permanent residence permit in Austria.
14. Learn English language prosody and fix pronunciation of vowels. Optionally attend a specialized language course.
    10% Few failed attempts.
15. Save 24X my monthly spendings, go through 13 investment books I read in 2015 and extract notes, do reviews and write about them.
    30% Saved some money, not as much because of the move. Total fail on book reviews.

This gives me 47% overall. Apparently, I fall into the 92% category of people who fail on their year resolutions.

Nevertheless, I find this exercise of planning for a year to be useful. At least it gives a sense of things that you want to do if otherwise you are too chaotic.

I hope you all have had a good year and will have even better one this year. Happy New Year! (Yes, yes… I know – it’s February outside, but someone had to be the last to wish you “Happy New Year!”)

Some people say that the best way to motivate yourself is to be inspired and/or desperate. At the moment I don’t feel like I’m any of those two. I was very ambitious and inspired in the past, but I guess things change as you get older.

One thing that still helps me a bit with motivation is planning and recognition of my work by others. You can get inspired just by thinking on what you want to do in your life. Also, in my opinion, planning puts you in somewhat desperate situation as you want to complete items from the list. I don’t know if you like planning or not, but I use it for the above reasons and for the reason of keeping track of greater picture of my life goals.

I’ve been writing year resolution posts on my blog since 2010. There are few things that I’ve learned about planning for a year. It is easy to overestimate what can be done and to lose track if no detailed planning was done. So for this year I want to set somewhat smarter goals and do a detailed elaboration on achieving them. I will break down tasks to monthly tasks and keep track of those separately from this blog, as it will be a total mess to post it here.

Let me start my planning with list of life areas to improve.

I want to improve:

• health by running regularly and doing some gym
• life satisfaction by travelling and having more quality time with family
• soft skills by copying the best characteristics of people I admire
• professional skills by learning one or two technologies and doing a personal project
• foreign languages proficiency by acquiring German B1 and fixing English accent
• financials by learning more on investing, keeping expenses low and deciding on home purchase

Now let me convert this list into some concrete achievable and measurable items.

1. Run 2-3 times a week for at least 5 warm months.
2. Make start of the day more healthy and productive. Ideal scenario would be: get up at 05:55AM, drink glass of water, do exercises for 15-30 min, shower, some important task and/or planning for the day, breakfast, work… But I will consider this item achieved if I start doing exercises regularly even if it is only 2 times a week just for 10 minutes.
3. Travel to the UK, Norway, sea side country, and do a car trip somewhere nice.
4. Spend one hour every day with my daughter playing and learning things.
5. Count not more than 12 weekends in a year when we didn’t go out to do some activities.
6. Learn 12 simple skills from other people. To achieve this goal I will first identify 12 people from the community and those surrounding me and chose some characteristic I admire.
7. Read at least 6 technical books.
8. Watch at least 12 pluralsight courses.
9. Write a simple stock analysing web site. It could have any set of features, point is to get something interesting running.
10. Write any simple useful open source tool. I have WCF related idea in mind.
11. Learn at least two web technologies. I have NodeJS and AngularJS in mind at the moment.
12. Share knowledge more actively. Minimum would be to write 24 blog posts, answer 12 questions on SO, help few people online.
13. Acquire B1 German certificate, attend German course, finish entire German Duolingo tree.
14. Learn English language prosody and fix pronunciation of vowels. Optionally attend a specialized language course.
15. Save 24X my monthly spendings, go through 13 investment books I read in 2015 and extract notes, do reviews and write about them.

In the end of this year I don’t want to find myself among those 92% who fail with their new year’s resolutions, therefore keep an eye on me and I promise I will keep an eye on you, provided that you share your list with me.

Happy New Year!

2016-Feb-01 UPDATE: This is how I’m now tracking completion of the above list. I have a broken-down list of tasks for each month in OneNote and I also have recurring and detailed tasks tasks in Wunderlist app.

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!

A quick recap of year 2014

2014 didn’t turn to be forth life changing year in a row. I still have the same job and live in the same place. As I probably mentioned before, I’m working as subcontractor to International Atomic Energy Agency (UN associated organization). This year I’ve mostly done JavaScript and less of .NET. But I don’t mind. That is because JavaScript has its own beauty.

My daughter is now bit older and of course occupies a lot of my time. She needs more and more attention as she moves closer to being two years old. In her year and a half she already travelled more countries than her grandparents in their lives. 2014 was definitely a year of travel. We visited islands of Malta and Mallorca and I’m really glad that my daughter is fine with planes, because this means that we can have more distant trips in future. Of course we travelled by car all around Austria (Prague and other places in Chez Republic, Munich, Slovenia and Croatia, Poland, lots of Hungary, etc) and in Austria, mainly visiting public swimming pools, museums and having some outdoor activities.

Picture taken at Ukrainian independence day celebration in Vienna, August 24 2014

It is fair to say that we tried to have each and every weekend somewhere outside. This of course had impact on what I could do to improve my professional skills outside of the work, which I didn’t do much except of reading few books.

There is one different thing that I started doing in 2014. I’m investing my money now. And not just bank deposits or mutual funds as I used to do, but the real thing – exploring equities and other instruments and buying then (for long). I’m planning to do more of this in 2015.

Plan for 2015

This is continuation of my year plan/report thread. I had similar plan for 2010, 2011, 2012, and for 2013. Completion of 2010 list was almost 100% successful, completion of 2011 list was less successful. 2012 list completion is somewhere in between. Both 2011 and 2012 greatly changed my life. Same was with the year 2013 and it was mostly successful. You can see above how my 2014 year went.

Last year I didn’t come up with new year’s resolution. Things didn’t go sideways because of that, but I had nothing to compare my achievements with. I think I will better have some simple list on what I’m planning and want to do.

1. Travel to Iceland
2. Travel the coast of Italy and do many other car trips
3. Improve German by attending at least 1 course
4. Improve English fluency and vocabulary by spending more time on learning words from read books
5. Read 4 sci-fi books
6. Read 13 software engineering books
7. Read 13 investment books
8. Start project with potential to make money
9. Do programming in other languages than C# or JavaScript
10. Take part in at least one programming contest
11. Visit at least one conference (even small one)
12. Write at least 26 blog posts
13. Increase community visibility by contributing more on github, tweeting, commenting on blogs
14. Improve health by exercising and attending swimming pool for at least 1 month
15. Make at least 2015 euro profit on new investments in 2015

It is a bit late, but I wish you all

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Year 2013 became life changing for me again being the 3rd year in a row, when I say this.

At the beginning of the year I knew that we are waiting for the baby. I decided on changing my job and approximately at the same time when my daughter was born I changed my job. Now I work for UN associated organization and I started working on something interesting – an offline capable web application written with EmberJs.

My plan for the year 2013 was quite extensive and had 21 items. I’ve achieved more than half of that but still much wasn’t done. Interestingly things not done are mostly skills related, which should probably keep me alerted.

Now a bit on each item.

The best thing which could happen. My daughter was born on 10th of June. Here are few pictures.

Now she occupies tons of my time. But it is not an excuse it rather has to be reason to do more!

Travel a lot. We definitely travelled a lot year. Because now we have small baby at home we are somewhat limited in distances we could travel. Thus year was mostly Austria explorative. My wife writes a blog post for each of our trips to different attractions.

Buy a car. I bought Ford Focus Traveller with big boot. Now we need one. It is diesel car so driver experience is somewhat different, but on other hand car proves itself great for long trips. Also I already took car for 5 times to Ukraine this year.
Ski high in the Alps. Not that I skied much this year. But I have a picture that proves that I skied in Alps at hight altitudes. Taken in Obertauern.

Learn German for real A2. I think I’ve failed here. No real need in communication in German. But I’ve attended A2 course so maybe I’ve learned something. At least for sure there is improvement when comparing to 2012.
Improve English fluency by applying more synonymous and idioms. Maybe. Now I work at UN where I have to collaborate with different people from all over the world in English, including native speakers.
Perform well & keep being challenged at work. I’ve changed my work. Now I’m self-employed and work by contract for UN associated organization through the other company. I’m happy that I’m quite challenged now, mostly thanks to interesting project and Iraqian boss.
Contribute to open source. Fail. One gist doesn’t count.
Deliver many technical presentations. None delivered. Instead I performed quite few presentations to our users. I even had to wear suite.
Extend social network at work & outside. Mostly failure here. My exposure has changed now. I feel myself somewhat in very closed community of developers.
Write some web project. I do this now at work all days long.
Do programming in other languages than C#. Yes, now I mostly program in javascript.
Take part in one or few programming contests. Fail, except of some TC single round matches.
Visit one or few conferences. Fail.
Improve blog quality. Fail, since nothing has changed on this blog and post frequency is low.
Write at least 41 blog posts. Fail.
Increase community visibility. Fail.
Read as many books as I like. Well, this couldn’t have been a fail.
Consistently do exercises. Fail.
Reach 2013 reputation at stackoverflow. Fail.
Earn 2013 euro outside. Since now I’m self-employed and earn significantly much more than before. I would say that here I’ve oversucceeded here.

Generally it was very good year. I’m very happy because of my born daughter. She is great. Next year we will start learning programming and travel a lot together.

Unfortunately it is very likely that whatever I say is just like on the picture below:

Nevertheless, I wish you all

HAPPY NEW YEAR!