2018 Goals and Habits

Last year I focused mainly on my weight. I developed healthy habits around diet and exercise and I plan to continue those through 2018, and hopefully for the rest of my life.

My overall focus for 2018 is going to be creativity. I have lists of unstarted ideas and folders full of unfinished projects. I have ideas for books, websites, a tabletop game, screencasts, and other programs. I always said I would get back to these some day. This year, I’m going to find “some day.”

My secondary focus for 2018 is learning. Some of my ideas will require me to learn some new skills. I plan to use my creative projects to reinforce and grow my abilities in Python, data science, and machine learning.

I’m over half way through Python for Data Science and Machine Learning on Udemy. After that I’m either going to work through Practical Deep Learning for Coders on fast.ai or enroll in Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Coursera Course. If I have time I might do both.

I truly believe that data science and machine learning are the future. I got lucky and learned Ruby on Rails at exactly the right time to make web development my career. I hope to catch the AI wave before it passes me by. Not that I think Ruby on Rails is going away any time soon.

So my goal for 2018 is to develop habits around writing, both prose and code, and learning via online classes and books. Carving out time for these new habits might be a challenge, but hopefully I can work on something creative every week. I’ll continue to work on the good ideas and scratch out the bad ones. All while continuing to learn and grow as a developer.