The big event from last year was moving to Carmel, Indiana from Washington state. It was a huge cross-country move that sucked up a lot of my time and energy. But I’m happy we made the move. Since then I bought a cargo bike that I use daily, for rides to school, groceries, and other errands. I’m working with other local advocates to bring more urbanism to our suburban city. I’m not sure what 2024 will bring, but hopefully more of the same.
Taking inspiration from Ryan Boone, the following is a list of 2023 failures and accomplishments, and goals for 2024.
2023 failures
- ❌ Publish at least 12 posts on my blog. I fell short of my goal, but I still put out 9 posts, which is 8 more than 2022. I’m calling this a failure, but I’m also proud of how much progress I made. It makes me feel like publishing 12 this year shouldn’t be a stretch at all.
- 😞 Stay consistent with my daily habits. While I’ve maintained most of the list of daily habits I set for myself back in 2022, I’ll admit I’ve fallen off a bit. I still mostly stay off my phone first thing in the morning. I only stretch once a day now, but I find that’s enough. I definitely don’t exercise daily, other than riding a mile on my e-bike. I want to get back into this now that the weather is getting nicer. I don’t write daily either, but I’d say I do it probably every other day.
2023 accomplishments
- ✅ Convert my blog from Gatsby to Eleventy. I did it! My blog was gone through many different tech stack iterations, and I’ve probably said this every time, but I’m really happy with the new framework. What I love: the code base is extremely simple, the list of dependencies is very short, and I can understand how it all works even after taking several month long breaks. I’ve been slowly publishing all the 11ty tips and tricks I learned along the way.
- 🚲 Rode my bike more than I drove my car. As I mentioned, we moved to Carmel, specifically for the biking and walking infrastructure. I challenged myself to ride it for every trip that was feasible, regardless of the weather or my mood. I managed to do that for the most part, even when the paths were covered in snow and temperatures got down close to zero degrees.
2024 Goals
- Publish at least 12 posts on my blog. I’m giving myself the same goal again and this time I feel confident I’ll reach it. Last year, my focus was on writing and I feel like I got pretty good at that. This year, my focus is on editing and publishing. As of today, I have over forty drafts in various stages. Now I need to get better at editing and publishing. It’s time to shit or get off the pot, so to speak. Here are some of the topics I plan to finalize a post on this year:
- why we moved to Carmel
- more Eleventy tutorials: grouping posts by year, creating dynamic social share images, using SVGs/SaSS/Prism.js
- how and why I converted from Gatsby to Eleventy
- using Lighthouse CI to audit Netlify deploy previews on GitHub pull requests
- a longterm review of my Urban Arrow cargo bike
- burnout: what it’s like and how I handled it
- my complete salary history as a self-taught developer
- Get a small win with urbanist advocacy. No more slacktivism. I don’t know what this is yet, which is why it needs to be small. I’ve been working with a few other local advocates to improve walking and biking in our city. Some of the things we’ve been focusing on: adding a new mile-long bike path, lowering speed limits, removing restrictions on multi-family development, adding crosswalks near schools, and considering establishing a non-profit to focus on all of that. Most of these projects can take years to actually happen, so it’s hard to pin down a specific goal for this year. But I'm hoping to look back on 2024 and have something concrete to point to (maybe even literally).