It’s that time of the year again, and after a whirlwind 2018 - switching teams, a lot of work-related travel, and all those scandals in the news, it’s time to reflect on the year past and plan changes for the coming year ahead.

With that in mind, here are some resolutions I’m aiming for in 2019:

  • better work-life balance
    • attend a conference
    • exercise more
    • healthier social media usage
    • more realistic reading challenge target
  • learn a new programming language
  • actively support cooperatives

Happy New Year everyone!

On work-life balance

Attending a conference

Having not gone to a single conference in 2018, it’s time to step up my game. Hoping to be at at least one Linux / free software related conference and one SRE/DevOps type conference, hopefully participating in at least one of them

Exercise

Need to walk regularly! My Withings watch has been rather disappointed in 2018. I should probably use the gym more regularly too.

Social media: welcoming the Fediverse

Rather than putting all eggs in one social media basket, and wrestling with what the AI thought I want to read / who should be reading my posts, I’ve been experimenting towards the end of 2018 with using more federated social media platforms. Facebook is still really useful for catching up with family and friends, and Twitter for following newsworthy items (I follow mostly journalists and organizations I support) but the fediverse is quite great for following non-mainstream topics:

  • Mastodon, a federated Twitter-like service. While using an account on a single instance is possible (and just filtering by hashtags), I find that being on several instances help finding people with similar interests.
    • mastodon.social for free software / open source / privacy discussions. This is actually the main Mastodon node so the local timeline is like a spigot, so I just tend to read the toots of people I follow
    • social.coop for discussions on cooperatives and economics
  • Pleroma - an optimized platform that’s lighter on resources than Mastodon. Going to experiment running our own node for the Indonesian Web & Technology Community.
  • PixelFed for image sharing
  • Friendica for longer posts and for talking to people using both the OStatus/ActivityPub protocol (Mastodon et al) and Diaspora. Quite good for following all the Google+ refugees and talking politics, art and health.

Reading challenge

For Goodreads’ 2018 Reading Challenge I set a rather ambitious target of reading 42 books. While I did go 8 over in the end (though some of them are short stories, so I’m probably closer to just making it) it felt that sometimes I’m reading just to make a target rather than for enjoyment. For 2019 I’m setting a more relaxed goal of 25.

Programming Language

It’s been a while since I pick up a brand new language, and given that at work I get to deal mostly with Python and Chef-style Ruby, it’s time to finally pick up a personal project or two and do it in a new language.

Haven’t decided which of these to use; I’ll probably end up using a combinationof:

Cooperatives and Free Software

It’s quite sobering to realize the outsized influence a few large companies (both in the technology and finance sectors) have on our everyday lives – and it’s time to put my money in organizations I feel passionate about – whether credit unions or organizations such as the Software Freedom Conservancy. Too bad there’s not a co-op grocery nearby, I miss Bloomingfoods…

Become a Conservancy Supporter!