Hegel famously pointed the difference between what is and what should be. Yearly goals would be a great example, but I don’t think that the big H. was so mundane as to write to-do and goals lists. He was probably too busy writing actual philosophy. Good for him!
Myself being a failed philosopher, I cannot resist. Every Saturday morning I make a list of chores and fun things I want to accomplish that weekend, I try to plan for books to read and travels a few months ahead. Obviously, I have a list of yearly goals. These past two years I’ve been spectacularly bad at it, finishing basically nothing of what I’d set out to do. To save the embarassement, I want to highlight some of the best and some of the worst of 2018, with a look at the year to come.

MATHS

My goals for this year were to study Artin’s Algebra and Sernesi’s Geometria 1. I failed at both. Artin’s Algebra proved too difficult stil, while I subbed Sernesi for other textbooks in combinatorics and graph theory. My progress in maths is slow but going. Hopefully I’ll dedicate more time to it in 2019.

GIREVOY SPORT

My 2017 goal was to reach 50+50 snatches with 16Kg. I didn’t succeed then, I didn’t succeed this year. I didn’t train all that much due to flu, cold, and an aching knee. I realized that I went from 5 workouts a week in 2016 to maybe 20 workouts a year. This is something I certainly need to change in 2019.

LEISURE

I went to two vegan festivals with my girlfriend, both of them were inspiring in different ways: the first one was rather “mainstream” and showed me how even non-political veganism can be helpful. The second one was very politicized and, honestly, it was a blast. I’ve got to read a lot of anarchist literature and hang out with people that share my views on such a niche topic. We’re planning to expand on the vegan festivals list for 2019.

In terms of travel:
- Spent a week in Koln in January. I really like Koln so it’s always nice to be back there
- Spent a week in Andalusia (Sevilla and Cordoba). I went to attend my girlfriend’s graduation and though it would be quite boring, but it turned out to be magnificent. I’d certainly like to go back to visit Malaga and Granada
- Spent another week on a small tour of Germany (Munich, Stuttgart, Tubingen, Koln). I think the highlight was Tubingen. To be in front of the Holderlinturm was something else
- Spent 3 days in Munich for MuniHac

I’ll spend January 2019 in Mexico, probably 3 days in Zurich for ZuriHac. Otherwise, we don’t have much planned.

One goal this year was to go below 5kyu in Go. I got pretty close, but I’m not there yet. My Go journey is always made of ups and downs. I started strong in the first half of the year, then I kind of forgot about it after a trip abroad, then went back to it at the end of the year. Needless to say, such stop-and-go are not helping my improvement. I feel that strategically I don’t lose all that much, but tactically I have to go back and look at corner shapes and josekis that I clearly forgot.
One realistic goal for 2019 could be to play 2 serious 19x19 games a week, with no expectations as to rating.
Thanks to a colleague I’ve also got into the world of Starcraft II. I’m playing fairly regularly and I’m currently in silver league. One goal for 2019 could be to reach gold league.
Thanks to another colleague I signed up to goodreads. I especially like the “I want to read” feature that I’m using extensively. According to the website, this year I read 37 books. Some people say it’s a lot, to me it’s quite embarassing. Nonetheless, I believe it’s important to focus on quality rather than quantity. I read quite a few maths textbooks and programming mammoths (Haskellbook is one of them, although reading it is mostly re-reading it). This year I’ve also read a modicum of philosophy (Clastres, Ocalan, Bookchin, Boetie, Lakatos, di Cesare…), I hope to read more in 2019.

LANGUAGE

One of my goals for 2018 was to become fluent in German. That’s not happened yet, however:
- I’ve traveled to Germany three times and was able to talk a bit with the locals (ordering at restaurants, asking for information, reading notices etc.)
- I’ve got a golden tree on Duolingo
- I’ve read the first Harry Potter book in German with less and less use of the dictionary. At the beginning I could barely read 3 pages before collapsing, after a while I was reading entire chapters on the commute
- I’ve started watching German youtube and adding German subtitles everywhere

I expect to improve even more in the coming months.

PROGRAMMING

@home
I got to write what Julia Evans calls “impossible programs”, that is, programs I didn’t think I could write before trying: SAT solvers, parsers, graph algorithms, and a small interpreter. More than once I had the sensation that the software was exceeding my expectations.
This year I didn’t write a ton of Haskell, but the little I did was certainly different from “exercise-Haskell” and more like “application-Haskell”. I want to keep writing impossible programs in 2019. Another thing I’d like to get deeper into is CS theory, especially combinatorial optimization and complexity theory.
Sort of unrelated, but I gifted myself a mechanical keyboard. I finally decided to bite the bullet and it proved to be the best bullet I’ve ever eaten.

@work
The absolute highlight was writing an Haskell service. As of late I’m getting more and more into TDD which is less pain and more gain than I initially imagined. It’s forcing me to pay more attention to how my feature is affecting the whole domain, something I’ve always struggled with. This is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about TDD, but I’m glad of this side effect.
I attended two courses and an hackaton, all kindly paid by my company:
- a two days course on the theoretical side of functional programming: what are functors, monoids etc. with examples in a language that’s not Haskell (Typescript). This was highly informative and inspiring, it rekindled my hope to bring FP concepts at work
- a two days course on the BEAM internals. Not particularly mind-blowing for an experienced Elixirist but nice nonetheless
- MuniHac. Do I need to say more?

Regarding conferences in 2019, I sent a talk proposal for a BEAM lite event called “The hidden algebra of everyday code”. One event I really want to attend is ZuriHac.

In the last quarter I was moved to another team and the change has been interesting. They have a very different style and although we all work on the same services, there’s a sensible difference in how the tasks are split. I feel like I have less of an opportunity to write things I enjoy (namely algorithms) but I get to improve in areas where I was lacking (anaylsis and domain-vision). Moreover I feel that my technical input is heard more.
One of my goals this year was to become a better team player (basically, not whine as much) and a better debugger (develop the ability to attack a problem from more and more angles). I think I improved at both, I’m especially impressed by the latter.
For 2019 I could think of a few areas where improvement is needed:
- less sarcasm. Not that I’m snarky, I hope, but it doesn’t help and could be perceived in the wrong way
- more chill. I’m very passionate about some issues at work that I want fixed (e.g. bugs that, well, bug me). I need to learn to be more zen about it or I’ll lose my sanity
- more robust code. I still find it very, very hard to write dynamically typed code that doesn’t break. Since I’ve been told that it’s actually possible to do such a thing, I need to learn how to do it