New Year 2023

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Professional Ambitions
• Learning Ambitions
• Personal Ambitions

Introduction

I've spent some of my downtime this holiday period considering my ambitions for the year ahead, and establishing some new habits for 2023. In general, the theme can be considered to consume less and produce more.

Throughout the year, but peaking in October and November of 2022, with mass lay-offs and hiring freezes across enterprise tech, Musk's dramatic acquisition of Twitter, and the collapse of FTX (pulling down the majority of the web3 initiative), I found myself absorbed and fatigued from the endless spill of drama and opinions online.

With deliberateness, I detached from Twitter and YouTube, instead steering my attention towards studying printed education materials. The emphasis on studying; to absorb the materials with intent and produce my own notes and observations.

I had already read 75% of Atomic Habits by James Clear this year, but recognised that after the initial spike of inspiration, I had not internalised or put to practice any of the learnings. My current re-reading has me extracting out key quotes and following the exercises as prescribed, to much greater effect. I've had great results habit-tracking with the HabitKit app by Sebastian Röhl, to maintain awareness and motivation beyond the book.

My intent is to leverage and extend this new framework to work toward the following ambitions for the year ahead:

Professional Ambitions

• Craft Applied — 2022 was a year spent re-establishing a strong foundation for my agency after a draining 2021. I'm surrounded by a strong team, with firm business practices, constructive customers, and a renewed vision for place in the market. My ambitions are to retain our establish marketing practices, bring in five new customers and double last year's revenue.
• SaaS Launch — After finally reaching some major development milestones just before the holiday break, I'm now confident of delivering, launching and announcing my first SaaS product in the first half of this year. It's been a long road, but I'm optimistic about it being well received.
• Google Developer Group Douglas — Having re-established our presence with a number of events last year, I want to return to a monthly cadence of community events, with the ambition of delivering two marquee events during the year (International Women's Day 2023 and Isle of Man DevFest 2023).

Learning Ambitions

• Learning TypeScript — I only wrote TypeScript throughout 2022, now fully converted to appreciating all the advantages offered by the compiler. I want to consolidate my fundamental understanding by studying O'Reilly's Learning TypeScript by Josh Goldberg.
• Learning Rust — I'm carrying over this ambition from 2022, where I want to study Programming Rust by Jim Blandy. Throughout the year I dipped in to different Rust materials and following adoption of TypeScript, I'm much-more keen and confident for learning a strongly-typed systems language.
• SolidJS Open Source — The SolidJS community continues to grow, particularity with their SolidStart meta-framework growing in maturity. I've been thinking about producing educational content for this framework.

Personal Ambitions

• Run a Marathon — I've been harbouring this one for years, time to actually deliver. The Isle of Man Marathon is scheduled for August of each year, with a list of UK Marathons to also consider.
• Travel to Việt Nam — Following the launch of the SaaS, I'm keen to exercise those nomadic skills again and work on the road across Southeast Asia.
• Travel to United States — 2023 marks 10 years since I was last in New York. Long overdue another visit, with people to catch up with on both the east coast and west coast.
• Buy Mechanical Watch — I want to purchase a mechanical watch, to celebrate a long-held professional milestone.