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!”)