My goals for 2021

  • Jan 2, 2021
  • Alfonso Alba
  • Other

TL;DR

…There is no TL;DR for this post. You will have to read it this time if you are interested 🙃

2021

This will be the first time that I write about my goals for a new year. David Bonilla has inspired me to do it after reading his posts with new objectives for the last years. Even though I set goals every Christmas, I usually forget about them around February. I’m sure that writing them down and sharing them here will help me to revisit them often and keep my focus on what I want to achieve.

Personal goals

Diet (high priority). In 2018 I was diagnosed with an intolerance to sorbitol. I was given a diet that excluded any kind of fruit. Also, I could only eat like 7 kinds of vegetables. It is a very restrictive diet. The doctor who prescribed me the diet is an excellent professional and I really trust him. He did a good job diagnosing the intolerance but I’m not sure that following such a restrictive diet for the rest of my life it’s a good idea. One of my goals for 2021 is to go to a nutritionist and tailor an appropriate diet for me.

Estoicism a is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. One of its principles is to focus and act on what depends on you and accept what doesn’t. It has helped a lot during this year to bear the COVID-19 pandemic. I will not go deeper into all the principles of Estocism in this post, but in 2021 I want to delve into this way of thinking and apply it to different aspects of my personal and professional life.

Typing (high priority). I think that typing fast and with precision can improve your productivity. Once you develop the muscle memory that allows you to type without thinking about it, you can focus more on what you type (i.e. code) and less in what is the next letter you have to press on your keyboard. Some of the things I want to achieve:

  • Finish this and this online typing courses
  • Improve my average typing speed, which is about 25 words per minute at the moment
  • Improve my precision, which is about 80% for letters and about 50% for numbers if I don’t look at the keyboard

Trekking (medium priority):

  • Go at least twice a month to walk in the mountains near Madrid
  • Go outside Madrid on a trip to walk some trails at least twice this year (if COVID restrictions allow it)

Raspberry (medium priority) After buying a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2020, 2021 will be the year in which I will put it to work for me:

  • Add a VPN to be able to access my Home network from the outside
  • Create a self-hosted CD/CI with Jenkins
  • Play the Gong when some events happen, like when we get a new user in our SaaS software for example.

Surgery (high priority). I tore the Supraspinatus tendon of my right shoulder about one year and a half ago. It’s not a critical wound at the moment meaning that I can still work and carry on with my life and do some exercise. However, this year I want to get the surgery to heal it. It can get worse as I age and there some activities that I enjoy doing like Body Attack or paddle that I can’t do at the moment. I hope I can resume them after the surgery.

Sketchnoting (medium priority). Javier Alonso from dibujandocharlas.com presented a webminar this year about Sketchnoting. It was quite inspiring and I started to experiment with it. For this year I want to:

  • Give talks and use Sketchnoting techniques to make the slides
  • Use it also for the slides that I use in my courses

Profesional goals

Blog & Newsletter (high priority)

  • Continue to post in this blog, at least twice a month
  • Start the newsletter “A DevOps Diary” in which I share things related to my day to day job. Problems, solutions, events, articles, talks, or StackOverflow questions that I find interesting or useful for my day to day work.
  • After 6 years, start writing in the blog for cursodegit.com again.

Training (medium priority)

  • Improve the course materials for cursodegit.com
  • Give the advance git course to a company outside Spain
  • Improve and work on the other courses: Docker, Jenkins, and Kubernetes
  • Spin up my self-hosted academy and start giving the courses in it

Meetup (high priority) Start the meetups of the Spanish Git Meetup again, at least once per month.

Video Channels (medium priority) Create YouTube channels to complement the blog posts with videos. I have no equipment or experience recording videos so let’s see what comes out.

Learning (high priority) Last but not least, I want to dig deeper into the following technologies:

  • Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes
  • Bash
  • Python
  • Groovy / Java and Jenkins

Let’s see…

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, this is the first year that I publicly post my objectives. I think they are quite ambitious, I have high hopes for 2021. Let’s see how it goes. I can’t wait for the recap next year!