New Year Resolutions (2020)

I thought of putting a bit of pressure on myself by making a list of goals public. Some of the goals, such as the reading target, I’ve already managed to reach last year, but some, like writing, I’ve found quite difficult to stick with in the past. Those are the kind of goals which I want to do better this year!

Reading

• Books
  • I’m tracking reading progress in Goodreads Reading Challenge. Number of books read is not a good metric if one is interested to improve the quality of reading, but it’s an easily trackable one.
• Papers
  • My goal is to read and take notes of a minimum of 5 papers a month. I will be publishing the rough notes in the wiki on papers. These notes are are expected to be rough around the edges, since they are written to an audience of one, namely, myself. I’m interested in using the Feynman technique for learning things this year and wiki notes are a good way to experiment for this end.

Writing

• Blog posts
  • I hope to write about an intersting paper as a blog post based on the wiki notes. Goal is to write at least one blog post per month.
• Wiki updates
  • I’ve found that GitBook1. format is really useful for keeping technical notes in wiki format. I hope to keep this practice mostly as a brain dump for later reference.

Coding

Given that most of my coding will be in the work enrvironment, it is hard to come up with concrete goals for personal projects which I have a realistic goal of commiting to and sticking with. That said, there are a couple of areas I would like to focus on this year,

• Systems programming
  • Deep dive into JVM performance landscape
    • There a couple of books I would like to go through this year, such as - Java Concurrency in Practice, Effective Java Programming Language Guide2. and Java Performance: The Definitive Guide.
    • Playing with GC algorithms and knobs to get a better understanding of their various tradeoffs
    • Practical JMH benchmarking
  • Native coding with Rust and C++
    • With C++ the goal is mostly to keep the knowledge up to date
    • With Rust there’s so much to explore with many exciting possibilities!
• Functional programming - I’m going to use functional programming in the most broad sense here,
  • Scala - there are many interesting libraries I’m looking forward to play with and also to play with. Scala 3 (Dotty) new language features look quite exciting as well.
  • Keeping up with Haskell research papers.
  • Software verification - this is very broad topic which I have a strong interest in. On this front it would be aspirational for me to finish with practical coding Practical TLA+: Planning Driven Development.
• Other technical/maths books I’d like to go through this year,
  • A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics by Jeremy Kun
  • Elements of Programming by Alexander Stepanov

Activities

• Running
  • Keep up to the same level or do better than last year would be my goal this year for running!
• Hiking
  • Last year was a very productive and fun hiking year for me. I’m running out of intermediate to advanced one day hikes from groups like Outdooraholics which I haven’t done before! However, I still hope to do at least 5 one day hikes this year.

These goals are by no means exhaustive and I also might update the goals on areas I would like to focus more on as the year progress.

I hope to update the progress on these goals in wiki logs and new things I learn (and mistakes I make) in til entries.

Footnotes

• 1 - GitBook
• 2 - For the second time