Some weeks ago, I wrote a review on the goals for my 31st birthday.

Now it’s time to share what I have planned to accomplish for my 32nd birthday.

This year’s goals are for the most part inherited from the previous one, adding some more measurable metrics.

Indeed I plan to work on 4 areas:

  • Writing
  • New projects
  • Existing projects
  • Events

Let’s drill down on each of these.

Writing

I enjoy writing on this blog, talking about different topics from how I built my side projects to a bunch of different ideas that I have.

For my 30th birthday I planned to write 30 blog posts (I greatly underestimated the effort) and I wrote 6 of them.

For my 31st birthday I accomplished at the deadline the goal of publishing 12 pieces.

For my 32nd birthday I would like to publish 20 posts. I don’t think it will be easy but let me explain why I choose this number.

I wanted to increase the number of posts by a good amount since between May and June I published 5 articles. I started to develop a writing flow (of which maybe I would write about, a little meta uh?) so I think I could write more than last year. Moreover, I managed to solve some little issues related to rendering blog content, like formatting of code blocks and Mathjax formulas support. These improvements should make writing technical pieces somehow easier.

On the other hand I have other goals in this list, a full time job, an offline life and an ever increasing pile of books to read.

30 is a freaking crazy value. Like one piece every 12 days. Equivalent to mantain for a full year the frequency I had in the last two months.

24 that is 2 per month is still pretty heavy. It’s just a couple of extra days per article. I believe I need more time.

I think that one for every 3 weeks it’s manageable: 18 articles in a year. But come on, let’s make it a round number and a little bit more challenging: 20! Basically doubling the number of pieces on this blog.

In the last year I wrote just an article about data and ML and I would like to focus more on these topics. For having a numeric goal: 4.

Since I kept reading my article on the goals for 31st birthday to understand if it counted for the 12 pieces, I want to make it clear here: this post is included in the 20!

New projects

I think the best way to learn something in tech is building. Last year I deployed just one of the three projects I planned. But since two years ago I made it, and writing code is fun, I want to try again to deploy 3 new projects.

I have already talked about some of the options that I have in mind like wishlist and pasta time apps.

For keeping the focus on ML, one project should be on this area. I already have an idea about it, but let’s see in the next few months.

The general criteria is to make something useful and/or interesting (at least for me).

For the technical side I want to learn something new. In particular:

  • React since it is one of the most used frontend framework.
  • FastAPI for well the API, at PyCon I have heard great stuff about it.
  • Polars and Duck DB since are used by many devs in data related projects. I am a big Pandas user but having them in my toolbox it will be a nice addition.
  • Pytorch since I usually use Keras and I want to experiment with something different (but still mainstream).

Existing projects

Besides this blog on which I want to add some features (anyone said dark mode? Or customize it a little bit more?) I have other 2 projects that require my attention: While Model Trains and Italian Art Bot. Many things could be done to improve them, but I want to hammer out some specific points instead of targeting a generic “working on them”.

While Model Trains

I deployed the project in June 2023, and except some minor changes and work for collecting new candidates to add to the database I haven’t done much. This year I want to focus on:

  • 250 blog posts: currently there are roughly 100 entries in the DB and around 80 in the Google sheet waiting to be read or just added to the DB. I have to find some others, prepare comments and add to the DB.
  • Estimated reading time: adding reading time for each article. You should know how long the read could take before clicking on it.
  • Contact authors: write to all the authors with an article on the app. Last year I just wrote to half of them.

Italian Art Bot

This is a fresher project and I want roll with the momentum. Among the possible next steps I chose:

  • Open-source: make it open source after cleaning and refactoring a bit the code.
  • Fix hashtag: when I deployed the first version of the bot, Bluesky did not support hashtag. Now that it does I have to change the code to make the post with them. That should also help a bit for promoting it.

Events

As I said one of the things that I most appreciated about Pycon Italia 2024 was meeting and talking to people or, how smarter people would say, networking. I would like to have more of these opportunities in the next months and having it as a goal it’s a nice way to enforce this intention.

How can I measure it? I want to attend 5 in person tech events (either conferences or meetups).

Being a speaker at those events does not get a spot on the goals list even though I really liked the experience. But having this opportunity depends also on other people wanting me there. For sure I will present a proposal for coming events related to Python and ML.

Checklist

Here it’s a checklist to recap the goals, so it will be easier next June to check my work:

  • Writing 20 articles
    • at least 4 about data/ML
  • Deploying 3 new projects
    • Nice to use React, FastAPI, Pytorch and Polars/DuckDB
    • 1 ML project
  • Improving existing projects
    • While Model Trains
      • Reach 250 blog posts
      • Contact all authors
      • Add Estimated Reading time
    • Italian Art Bot
      • Cleaning code and make it open source
      • Fix hashtag
  • Attending 5 tech/data events in person

Let’s check them (off?) for the next birthday!