I'll be finishing a very boring, but well paying contract at the end of this year. After that, I'll be taking time off (potentially forever, since I'm already FI) to focus on things I care about:
1. Try out Zig and go back into hobby graphics programming/gamedev.
2. Decrease dopamine chasing, increase focus. I hope to achieve it via treating my work as my fun - i.e. if I'm bored, I should just get back to the IDE or do some research, instead of mindlessly jumping on HN or other news sites. If I'm too tired to focus, I should either go outside or just lay down and rest - instead of my usual routine of using Internet content as a source of pleasure.
3. Lose weight that has crept on me in the past couple years of working full-time.
* Improve at digital art, and make more handmade illustrations for my website. Transition from drawing representative objects to drawing people doing things.
* Further move my focus away from income generation, and closer to building a public good.
- read more. Read a couple of books this year, but I just want more, and more deep reflections on them.
- knowledge base: have more trackability around the stuff I like. So I'm getting into knowledge base management so that I can have pre written ideas and have a more easy path towards some future projects. Having that become a habbit is a goal for me.
- learn react + d3. Being a data scientist, I've always loved the cool data viz projects I've seen around the web, so I'd like to get my feet wet in the world.
- masters degree: I have had as a goal to join a masters program in statistics because it is a discipline I really enjoy studying and feel I can actually enjoy my routine during the 2 years I would be locked into. Now that I have the financial stability to maybe quit work for a while (or have another less demanding type of work), I feel the could be feasable.
- To get better at basketball. I have always loved that sport and it helped me get fit. But I've never been particulary good at it, so I'd like to improve to have more fun at pickup games.
Neat project. For what it's worth I want to poke around at it to discover "what kind of places might you recommend near me" to find out if I'm interested but I don't want to sign up without any sense of its value so I just closed the page.
Thanks! And I completely agree, I generally do the same. I don't sign up without a sense of the value.
I put the sign up wall - reluctantly - recently because people are not inclined to suggest their favorite quiet spots. And I need to grow the quiet map to make it liveable for me. Currently its all on my dime & time.
It needs to stay a free platform for users. It's not the affluent that live next to railways, share rooms, can escape to the countryside.
So I put the sign up wall so I at least have the possibility to send an email every once in awhile, to reach out to the interested users. To encourage them to add a quiet spot. I have not send such email since I created it 7 months ago.
I'm not happy with this "solution" but have not found a better way. Would welcome any advice or input.
My everyday living today is waiting for the war to end.
Electricity cut offs, freezing cold, water shortage, rocket
terror and general unpredictability make it harder for me
to commit to some sort of a long term plan, much less
muster enough energy to do Leetcode style interviewing.
Although, I've started running for an hour per day,
which helps with bad mood and suicidal thoughts.
My goals for 2023 and beyond are: survive,
connect with people like me, transition, hopefully
find a new tech job, get into health/longevity.
I believe that logevity is the next big thing.
> - Make some more meaningful open source contributions
What kind of project are you planning on contributing to? I keep telling myself that I should contribute to some Linux desktop project, but the problem I have is that everything seems to just work and I don't run into many issues to fix... :)
Expressing curiosity regarding your third point: the time zones of Latin America are very friendly to USA work. How does the violence fare in more expat (pricier) locations?
I’m sorry for you that you and your friends(/family) have to deal with an unsafe environment. I’m curious what you mean by violence. I got into a database of potential consultants for a Latin American software company, and I’m open to input regarding the viability of this work life balance as a single male.
If you earn an american salary, by that I mean from an american company and in USD, you'll have no problem living comfortably in an upscale neighborhood i.e. the safest and with lots of amenities. The reason is, not only you are paid in a strong currency (compared to the local ones) but also the quantity is higher.
Now, by violence I mean mostly all things stemming from drug-trafficking (hitmen, kidnappings, racketeering, extortion, carjacking) most commonly found in central america but expanding to southern countries more and more. The safest cities were historically Montevideo in Uruguay and Santiago in Chile, I may be biased but I think Montevideo is still safe and I'm not sure about Santiago, unless you choose to live in the eastern side of the city [0]. EDIT: you may want to factor political instability in your decision. I encourage you to ask other expats about their experience and what they see in the future, they're well-off so they they're lucky to avoid unpleasant experiences the local population has to deal with (plus they can always return to the US). I personally would only live in Chile and Uruguay, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Making it through the year without big health and financial setbacks. Enjoying the presence of the people close and dear to me. Play with our dog and cat. Trying to put the finishing touches on some of my personal projects.
1. start beekeeping in spring
2. creating some web apps in spring boot/angular (i'm a full time on premise dev)
3. having fun with wife and daughter :)
I purposefully avoid setting yearly goals, as so much can happen during that time. My real goals can change (and make me feel bad for being so indecisive) or I could pass good opportunities by being too focused on a different goal. What I like is setting a direction or a topic and – in absence of surprise, good or bad – try to follow it. In 2022, it was setting up the processes to run my company as smoothly as possible. For 2023, I want to reach out and experiment. That means getting myself out there to connect with interesting people and maybe find new clients, employees, friends,... The world is a fascinating place and that's the year I want to experience it. Here are some of the goals that go in that general direction:
* Finish the setup of my blog and start publishing posts from my (too long) draft backlog.
* Back in October, I started doing 3-month experiments with my day-to-day life to try different structures and seek personal fulfillment. Thanks to being a freelancer/contractor/consultant, I worked for 6 months at 120% plus the overhead of running my company and at 10% the next 3 months. Neither have much room to construct a meaningful work-life balance: work too much and there is no life, work too little and there is no point. Now that I work between 40 and 80% and it's the most fulfilling life I've had so far. But the lines between work and life are still too fuzzy and I know I can improve both by finding the right structure, hence the experiments.
* Publish some open source utils that I've created to scratch an itch and found no good alternative to – think Home Assistant / IFTTT but for commands on your own computer.
* I work on using technology to bring innovative solutions to SMEs (it won't awe the average HNer though...) and I used to organize hackathons. So I'm thinking about offering summer internships to build a Proof-of-Concept showing the value technology can bring.
I'd like to pivot in the opposite direction as you, from DevOps to software engineering.
I'd like to get more personal project done. I started many this year, but never finished most. (Friends have told me to seek ADHD diagnosis and treatment.)
I find myself wanting to do something entrepreneurial, but I very consistently talk myself out of any ideas I have for for moral/ethical reasons. I'd like to find something that doesn't involve some race to the bottom and also promotes some kind of, idk how to put this, rejuvenation of the commons. I used to daydream about starting a WISP and bootstrapping it into a FTTH provider, but I find I was mostly interested in the fiddling with and improving administrative/management software suites for WISPs and traditional ISPs. (I worked my way into tech from being a wisp/fttx technician for a summer job.)
Honestly? the main goal is surviving. 2022 fucked me so hard: my mental health was going downhill, my marriage is not in the best state, a war nearby, inflation, job issues, etc. I wasn't even recovering from 2021/2020. I really need a break.
1. Resume seeing the world. I haven't taken a trip abroad since the tail end of 2019.
2. Cultivate a mutual and meaningful friendship with someone. A non-existent social circle and approaching my fourth decade doesn't make this any easier.
- Started learning Japanese in 2022, so I’d love to pass JLPT N5 of N4 in 2023. These are beginner levels, so not very useful for anything, but it would be so cool!
- I’d like to start a micro-startup. I do a lot of open source, but would like to do paid work for a change! I have a few ideas, but need to learn how to make them billable.
- I very slowly started moving from Gmail to an email address with a custom domain name. I need to double down on that and get away from Gmail asap. I can’t stand Google anymore and Gmail is my biggest remaining tie to them.
settle in the netherlands (my family and i are moving to amsterdam in january).
it's going to be a huge change for us too -- going from a tropical country to an european city, not only not knowing the city itself (we've never been to AMS, only to London), but also, we don't speak any dutch (although my coworkers said i don't really need dutch, my wife and i are trying to learn it).
I think you do well to learn Dutch. People here speak English well, the universities are a magnet for international students and especially Amsterdam is quite international, so changes are that you will order something in a cafe in your best dutch and they would not understand you, because you speak Dutch.
Your coworkers left out an important detail though: on the workfloor, in the shops, anywhere, speaking English is fine. When socializing, there you will face obstacles.
After work hours are for relaxing. So, having to speak in English makes it less optimal, even if the Dutch are really willing to accommodate you there. Quite naturally, people will drop to Dutch again during conversations. If one have to make jokes, common references and all the stuff for which you need a finer touch which your mother tongue provides for, falling back to a foreign langue is a degradation. 1) vocabulary, 2) emulation vs native speed.
If you are with six dutchies and you are the only one that forces everyone to have a "degraded experience" of a fun night, you do well to try to learn Dutch. Tell them to fuck off if they switch to English when you want them to speak Dutch, so you can learn.
You can be direct and honest with the dutch, that is appreciated. When people start to insult you, congratulations! They are joking and signaling they accept you as one of them. You should respond with another insult.
When we do something social, we plan. Don't just drop by and assume you will be invited over for dinner. Dutch people are anti-social or well organized, pick your perspective. This is definitely a difference with more tropical social climates.
If you move in January, brace for cold, dim days. When spring comes, everything will look nicer.
I think there is plenty who experience this, but I felt like a small breakthrough happen when I took command and only used Norwegian instead of falling back to English. It helped a lot and even if it is not the best, it's opening doors in my career here, in that I am able to get interviews with mostly Norwegian speaking companies. :)
Good luck! In Amsterdam you won't need any Dutch, except occasionally when you have to sign some government papers.
But a little Dutch will certainly let you enjoy your stay a lot better!
Move family across continents, twice. Farewell dying parent. Move business across continents, once. Raise substantial funds at twice prior valuation. Find new everything: house/school/co-workers/site/equipment suppliers. Get back to work.
Time has rendered my goals impossible or irrelevant. I see little value in creating new ones, since life seems to be something which largely just happens to us, and the choices we can control are comparatively trivial.
I saw your post on learning Czech - that was another consideration for me. :) I bought a A1 book when I was on one of my trips to Prague but never really dug into it.
Get out of the negative income per month, even a 1 day per week remote gig would work, but employers are either all or nothing. There are no part time remote jobs in Germany, at least not that I'm aware of.
Spend less time on social media (first year this is a thing for me, but I joined NAFO early on and it was addictive in addition to very meaningful for me).
I had a few folks at thanksgiving dinner talk about being active in NAFO, which I had never heard of. They shared some hilarious memes. Seems like a pretty big group.
1. Try out Zig and go back into hobby graphics programming/gamedev.
2. Decrease dopamine chasing, increase focus. I hope to achieve it via treating my work as my fun - i.e. if I'm bored, I should just get back to the IDE or do some research, instead of mindlessly jumping on HN or other news sites. If I'm too tired to focus, I should either go outside or just lay down and rest - instead of my usual routine of using Internet content as a source of pleasure.
3. Lose weight that has crept on me in the past couple years of working full-time.