I am late to the party. Normally I tried to take off until Epiphany before I return to work, but I needed to start working on the 2nd so I wasn’t able to get to this post until now. As is my tradition I set my themes for the year that I want to focus on. I find doing so helps me stay on track and make sure that I am growing and improving myself.

Theme 1 – Health

I am carrying this one over from last year but it is always a good one for every year. In my feasting for the holidays I put on a little weight so I am going to attempt to lose 20 pounds before Easter. I hadn’t decided what I would do at the start of the year, but on Epiphany I decided I would do intermittent fasting and cut back on beer (and try to eat fewer carbs when I am eating). So far I am down 9 pounds 2 weeks in, so I should be able to exceed my minimum by Easter since the fasting will continue until then.

In addition to the health benefits of losing weight, I also would like to look better. Later on this year I will be involved in pitching for a series A and I want to look my best in those meetings. Ideally I would like to be more active this year too. When I was testing the Apple Watch that Sofi had I must admit the gamification aspect of closing rings was getting my to walk more and when I was walking was pushing me to walk faster to keep the heart rate up and close the exercise circle. So maybe I will take the plunge this year on one. Though at this point if I do that I would probably hold out for the series 5 in the fall.

Theme 2 – Learning

I have a couple of things in this bucket for the year. First is the machine learning course that I mentioned a few weeks ago. I am just about finished with the week 2 work and I can already see the benefits. It is already kicking my brain into gear thinking about the problems that we are trying to solve at work. Additionally I feel like the base knowledge will enable me to ask the right questions and help keep the ball rolling on that part of our system.

The second area of learning is going to be focused on is reading. Traditionally this is something I really push myself on, but I have fallen away from it a bit in 2018 just with interrupted sleep due to the ages of my children. Now that I am past that stage 2019 is going to be refocusing on getting through a bunch of books. Currently I am reading Leaders Eat Last which was a Christmas gift from my boss. I want to get back into my old pattern where I would try to read 10% of a book a day so I can get through a book in 10 days

Theme 3 – Security

Given all the sites that are constantly in the news each year with getting data stolen, I have decided it is time to take my password security to the next level. Instead of hard passwords I memorize I have switched to using a password manager and generating really long and random passwords that I don’t know. This makes is possible now to have no repeated passwords anywhere and I have found that it has already simplified my life.

I am also considering going the hardware key route instead of just using an authenticator app for 2 factor passwords, but I haven’t yet decided if I want to do that.

Theme 4 – Public Speaking

I have never been very comfortable speaking in public. Anyone who knows me knows that I am very talkative after I get to know a person, but something about being on a stage with all that attention directed at me has always made me uncomfortable. That being said it is a skill that I need to develop to go where I want to go in my career. Beginning this month I will be speaking at our board meeting, and then with needing to fund raise later on it is time for me to conquer this.

Fortunately the timing couldn’t be better in that I was also invited to speak at a developer meetup this year. I can’t think of a better way to practice this skill than to be speaking to a friendly audience of developers discussing technical topics. As that is an area in which I always enjoy speaking. Over my holiday break I began work on a talk, but when I realized it was going to take too much time I pivoted over to the Machine Learning class first as that is a greater need for me. Once I finish that class I intend to focus my time on putting this talk together and then I will get myself on the Calendar as a speaker (hopefully by Q2).

Conclusion

Those are my areas of focus for the year. As always I will do the run down at the end of the year and see how they turned out, as well as what popped up that I didn’t predict for the year. May everyone have a happy and productive year.