Resolution

I’m not the biggest fan of New Year’s Resolutions. They’re certainly not bad at all, and many people get tremendous use out of them, I simply think that anything that’s really important—like health, connectedness, or finances, shouldn’t wait till 1 January of the next year. And stacking many overly ambitious goals on your plate at once can lead to feeling overwhelmed with all the work you’ve given yourself. It’s been my experience that frequent, minor reflections and improvements are more sustainable. As an aside, that’s one thing I like about Python and other languages with an interactive interpreter; the ability to test out small excerpts of code in isolation and continuously iterate and improve on them.

But, all that is just one perspective. What about things that aren’t crucial but would be nice little life improvements, like trying to blog regularly, or practice piano again? For those sorts of less-critical goals, why not set a date and structure them?

That’s actually what I’m planning to do. I’d like to write a blog post about once a week. Not about me or my life, because I know myself quite well and it’s probably not too interesting to people who aren’t me, but to preserve and organize my thoughts on what I do, and maybe use them in a more efficient way.

Some of the ideas I have are, but not limited to:

• What generators in Python are actually all about, and how to use them. Not strict definitions of how the syntax works — for that, you can read the official doc (not slighting it at all, that’s its purpose, and it’s great for that purpose), but what those definitions mean in practice, and how I’ve used them in both toy problems/projects and at work.
• Making workflows more efficient, both in a technical and nontechnical sense.
• Strategies I’ve found useful for improving legacy projects.
• Bringing interesting stuff you’ve learned, technical or otherwise, on your off time, to work.
• Reflections on being a professional programmer for a decade.

Hope to see you here!