Things I Plan To Accomplish This Year

While I wasn't able to do everything that I set out to do last year I'm still proud of what I had accomplished. I don't usually talk about my personal goals but to switch it up a bit I will share the things that I'm aiming to accomplish for the next twelve months. The truth is I'm hoping that this would also serve as a way to make myself more accountable. I guess telling the world what I'm up to would bring a healthy amount of pressure for me to follow through. Right? Let's start.

Finish my dental clinic scheduling website side project

I have a friend who is a dentist. Back in August 2023, I reached out to him and said that I would a build a website for his business. Nothing fancy. My plan was to have a nice looking website that would let his clients schedule an appointment. I thought of doing this project to make sure that my backend web development muscles don't atrophy since I'm mostly doing embedded software development nowadays.

However, fast forward to five months and I barely made a dent to that whole project. I could think of millions of excuses why did that happened but the truth is it's all about the lack of execution.

Deep dive to machine learning and AI

I dabbled with machine learning three years ago and built a face mask detection Python application. I know that it's just the ABCs of that world but I was proud of that thing. However, I completely fell off the wagon after that. So this year I will get back to the basics and devour books on this subject.

Run a marathon

I might have added this just to justify the money that I might spend on the smart watch that I was eyeing for the past two weeks. I've never been a consistent runner so I'm taking it slow. Good thing the apartment complex that I'm staying at has a gym with a treadmill because it's January and everything is covered in snow. I'm running at the pace of 7:35 min/km for 10 minutes almost everyday.

Join a basketball club

While basketball might not be the cool sport here in Sweden, this country has produced an NBA player. They do play ball here so I might just need to scour Facebook for groups that play hoops.

Write 10 blog posts

This blog has been up for almost three years now but I haven't been consistent in writing on it especially the past year. One of my main aim this year is to refocus in writing on this blog consistently. I don't have a sophisticated reason why I chose the number 10 but I figured it's a challenging but an achievable target.

If I don't reach this number this then proves that this is just a waste of money and I have to shut this thing down.

Read twelve books

I'm on my first book for this year and it is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

Here are the books that I read in 2023:

• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau
• Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins
• Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
• The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
• Bird By Bird - Anne Lamott
• C Programming: A Modern Approach (2nd Edition) - K. N. King
• The War of Art - Steven Pressfield
• Effective C++ - Scott Meyer
• The Hobbit - J.R.R Tolkien
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• History of Sweden - Captivating History

Learn Swedish

One of the best ways to learn about the culture is to learn the language. I've been taking language lessons every Saturdays which proves to be fun and frustrating at the same time.

I still don't know exactly how am I going to determine if I succeeded on this or not though. Maybe being able to confidently ask for some help in the grocery store without getting a confused look as a response?