It’s again that time of the year in which I celebrate that I am another year closer to retirement.

Last year I wrote A retrospective on my 30th Birthday Goals, and I thought I could as well write a similar one reviewing the last year. However, last time I ended up writing also about the goals I would like to reach, this time in line with Agile philosophy I will divide the review and the planning for next year.

Let’s see what I had to accomplish in the last 12 months:

  • Keep working on this blog with the realistic goal of 12 posts in the next year.

  • Work on whilemodeltrains.com adding new features (I have already in mind a bunch of them) and new posts, plus let people know it is live.

  • Launch other 3 projects to expand my technical toolbox and build something cool!

I worked towards all of them, but with different degrees of effort and success.

12 Blog Posts

When I was outlining this goal I was like “How hard could it be to publish a post per month?” Well, first of all it was 11 months, and given all the events happening in real life, I would take off another month.

On mid-November I had just published 2 entries, and I said to myself it would be enough to produce a piece per calendar month plus extra 3, I had still 7 months to go after all.

In November, December and January I published a blog post in the last hours of the month and February passed with zero posts. It took forever editing the piece about RSA algorithm, especially for writing the formulas with Mathjax. It came out just at the end of March.

I had still to write half of the posts and I was left with two and half months. I had a little more than 2 weeks per article, a bunch of ideas in the backlog and a couple of unfinished drafts.

Then, in close succession, I was able to refine technical pieces I had in my drafts and as the deadline approached I wrote and published with higher frequency, like 5 posts in 7 weeks, landing at 11 posts.

And this is the 12th! Mission accomplished!

Done Well & Not So Well

  • ✅ Goal accomplished: right at the deadline, in the fashion of a B-movie where the hero cuts the correct wire of the bomb 10 seconds before the explosion.

  • ✅ Support for Mathjax: adding it makes easier to write math related stuff.

  • ✅ Short time from idea to publishing: for some posts, not strictly related to tech, I was able to go from from idea to publishing in a matter of days.

  • ❌ Irregular publishing: the blog posts came out with very irregular frequency, with a peak near the deadline. I should manage writing and editing to have a smoother pace, considering that some pieces take for sure more than others.

  • ❌ Missing data/ML: this year I did not talk at all about ML and data (except on how to extract it from PDF tables and plots). I would like to write more about these themes in the coming year.

While Model Trains

I pushed online While Model Trains exactly a year ago. Apparently I love deadlines!

I haven’t implemented a single feature of the ones that I had in mind (e.g. personalized articles and recommended ones). I planned to insert new posts into the database but in the end I added them just on my Google sheet where I collect articles that I find interesting before the final selection.

About advertising it, I contacted roughly 40 of the writers letting them know that one or more of their posts are in the app (and of course I could remove them if they did not like the idea). I received a bunch of positive feedback, also from famous tech personalities, and some ideas of features like providing estimated reading time (that was already on my list) and make the list of articles available on GitHub (at the risk of spoiling the surprise). Anyway I would like to focus again on this project.

Done Well & Not So Well

  • ✅ Contacted authors: I emailed some of the bloggers featured in the app. It was nice letting them know that I appreciated their work and many replied with kind words.

  • ❌ No new entries: after the initial bulk upload I have not added a single new article on the app. I would like to update the database in the next weeks.

  • ❌ Limited promoting: except sending emails to the authors and adding the link of the project to my blog and Github profile I have done little to promote this app.

  • ❌ Estimated reading time: a really useful feature to have since I was not the only one thinking about it. I did not manage to implement it but I would like to work on this soon.

3 New Projects

In the previous year, I have been able to finally publish my blog, arrange the Google site for our wedding and deploy While Model Trains. I thought that I could repeat the feat but, after 6 months it was clear that is was kinda impossible unless focusing just on this and forgetting about writing.

I was able to build and deploy an Italian Art Bot on Bluesky. That took something like 2 weeks unevenly distributed between August and January.

I worked with some friends on a couple of app ideas: a web app to localize positions in a “closed” property and a smartphone app for organizing events and hanging out with new people. At least from this last one I learned a tiny bit of Reactive Native and made a blog post highlighting the importance of repros and generous people (and software updates). In the end we stopped working on these ideas because we had other personal projects that required our time.

Besides the bot and the abandoned projects, I had a couple of other ideas to implement:

  • Wishlist sharing web app, proposed by my wife, for solving the issue of finding the perfect gift for your friends and family and avoiding to receive ugly ones. Maybe she was trying to tell me I have to make better presents to her?

  • Site to tackle the timeless problem that on pasta packaging the time needed for cooking is anywhere except where you are looking for. Instead of mouthing swear words, you could just look for the brand and type of pasta and get the time.

Maybe I will implement one of those!

Done Well & Not So Well

  • ✅ Deployed one project: I was able to implement and deploy an Italian Art Bot for Bluesky. I am satisfied of the result and of what I have learned.

  • ✅ Other opportunity: I had the chance to present how I built the Italian Art Bot at PyCon Italia in Florence. That was totally unexpected and a great experience.

  • ❌ Failed goal: 1 out of 3 projects. The math doesn’t leave a lot of space for discussion.

  • ❌ Too many ideas: I had to many options to work on and I did not focus on those that I could carry out.

Considerations

Out of the 3 goals that I had, I accomplished one at the last minute while I mostly missed the other two. For sure it was ambitious imagining to complete all of them, but even the ones that I failed gave me some good side results.

Even ignoring all of the above, it has been an eventful year filled of mostly great stuff. Elena and I finally got married and we had a little great party. We visited a bunch of places: Lanzarote in June, road trip in Ireland in August, Dubai and Maldives in September for our honeymoon and Costa del Sol in May.

Since this sprint it’s done, it’s time for celebrating my birthday, recharging batteries and planning the goals for next year.