Blog more
I’ve planned this for 2018, but failed, as I wrote only 4 posts here. I have several other sites, but I post there too sporadically, and those posts are either translations, or quick short notes, or “reblogs”:
I want to write more of something meaningful, like sharing my experience, knowledge or observations. I have 16 drafts on this site, so plenty of ideas to write about.
Read more books
The amount of articles and technical literature (like documentation) is still a huge part of my life, but I feel that this is not enough and not a complete reading experience.
In 2018 I planned to read more, and actually did that, from 0 books in 2017 up to 4 in 2018:
- “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future” by Ashlee Vance
- “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline
- “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy” by Martin Lindstrom
- “User Story Mapping” by Jeff Patton
I’ve started a couple of others, but quit early as they were not resonating with me. I want to focus on personal development and some fiction in between. That’s why I bought Atomic Habits by James Clear and plan to start it asap and have a lot of ebooks by Richard Morgan (“Altered Carbon” and others).
This year I decided to more actively use my Kindle Paperwhite and connected Goodreads account, and even set a goal there for myself to read 12 books during 2019. That’s just 1 book per month, and upping from 4 in the previous year, I think, that’s not too high and not too low.
On a side note: I have and actually use Google Play Books app/service. The nice thing is that prices there are quite often significantly lower than on Amazon for Kindle. And there are author-specific “bundles”, where you buy several books on Play Books for the price of a single one on Amazon. That’s how I bought Morgan’s collection. But I still prefer Paperwhite whenever possible.
Personal Project 1 – Bemailr
This one ought to be released the previous year, and also the year before that. It’s already like 2.5 years in the making, with constant rewrites, on/off state. This time I made myself a soft deadline – spring 2019. Most likely March/April.
I used to be very passionate about this project, and all the time that was spent on it – taught me a lot, but the end result is still not ready for production. The framework under it, its core, is more or less usable, but there is still no actual value for end users.
This is the year when I will either release it, or abandon for the good.
Personal Project 2
I have a bunch of different ideas that I’m personally interested. Long list of them, actually. And with the second project I want to try something absolutely different from WordPress.
I will use Slim or Laravel (depending on the size of the idea selected) framework to create a solution to either a WordPress developer or a YouTube channel maintainer problem.
The issue is that I don’t want anymore to create for the sake of creation, I want something that provides a real value and that people will actually use. Thus I don’t want invest time heavily on a project that will be used by a dozen of people, at best. I want thousands, at least.
Throughout my career I’ve participated in several big projects, in different roles (managing teams and being a developer, close to business owners and marketing specialists). So I’ve learned quite a lot.
The skill I still feel I’m lacking – launching the product.
Of course, I released quite a few new WordPress plugins, but that was long time ago, and they were too niche, and they were quite small. I want to have a bigger picture in front of me, and a wider experience.
I challenge 2019 to be the year of actual accomplishments.
