First of the year

Ignoring global events, 2016 was an interesting year for me. Personally, I manged to achieve, and more importantly learn, quite a bit: I switched jobs, started learning Scala (full time), started learning and working with machine learning, entered my first BBQ competition and my first Chilli cook-off competition. I also submitted my first proposal for a conference talk - it was not selected in the end, but I was pleased to have at least submitted it, and one of my goals for 2017 is start public speaking (conferences/meetups) so will hopefully continue to submit talk proposals in the hope that one gets selected by the end of the year.

There are probably lots of things that I had in mind to do at the start of the year that I didn't manage - such as finishing my education side project, but never mind.

The new tech stuff I have been able to learn has been a product of moving jobs, so that's cool, and I'm very happy with what we are doing there at the moment, but with the two cooking competitions I signed and paid up to enter both of them early in the year on a whim, and that provided the motivation and deadline to force me to practice, prepare and actually complete them.

2017

So here are a few goals I am aiming for in this coming year:

Machine learning - let's start with a realistic one. I want to become a lot more competent and experienced in the ML field. It's an exciting area right now, and something that is only going to get more prevalent, so I am really happy to be somewhere I can be involved in it from the start of a project and get to know it better.

Writing - A little different this time. As a goal to aim for, and also just to see the wider process I want to write a book. About meat. I have lots of ideas already, it will be relatively short but at first at least it should be an e-book whistlestop tour of hows and whys of cooking meat.

Kickstarter - I am currently working on an android app for my boy (5 years old), and it made me think about how I could make it more accessible for other kids to make their own apps. So I might kickstart it once I have made some progress. Again, mostly for the experience of running a kickstart project rather than actually expecting to get the money to do it.

Public speaking - As mentioned, I would like to get into this. So if I manage to get a proposal accepted before the end of the year, that would be cool.


On to the next one!