Chris KrychoPublic-ish Plans
A few goals for 2015
I have not (yet) made a formal list of goals for 2015, though I think I may do so on Sunday evening. While New Years’ resolutions can be silly and get us in trouble (when we set unrealistic goals, or unhelpful goals), the turning of the year can also be a helpful time to evaluate the way we spend our time and the things we want to accomplish.
What follows is a list of public-ish things I am hoping to manage in 2015, in no particular order. Come the end of the year, I will Lord willing look back and see which of these I was able to pull off!
Publish at least two seasons of Winning Slowly with Stephen Carradini just as we did last year—but better.
Get the site for Winning Slowly updated so that it paginates between seasons! This means writing an extension for Pelican that can paginate on something besides page count. An excuse to write Python? I call that winning.1
Migrate Jaimie’s Jaimie’s professional writing website from WordPress to Ghost. (Maybe do something similar with her current personal site, which runs on Blogger. Yuck.) I’ve gotten a bit of a start on that already, and I hope to knock it out sooner rather than later.
Get to a point where I’m hosting all my own sites on my own DigitalOcean droplet (or similar). I’ve been moving that direction slowly but steadily anyway—whereas I started and ran for a long time on simple shared hosting, I’ve been using Webfaction for a good chunk of the past year, and now am pretty well ready to take the plunge this year into just running my own server. No skin off their backs; Webfaction has been great, as was StableHost before them. I’m just ready to be in control (even with the bit of extra maintenance that entails).2
Write at least three minutes of music, and post it to my SoundCloud account. Preferably five minutes, but at least three.
Write some poetry.
Write a substantive essay and post it at least once a month.
Post at least a half dozen book reviews (which, among other things, means reading at least a half dozen books worth reviewing). These can be fiction or non-fiction. Personally, I’d like to get everything from Dostoevsky to Schreiner in there.
Add a picture to my About page!
Post a #family update at least once a month. It’ll be good for me, just to have a better way of tracking what’s going on with our little gals, and I know my family would enjoy it, too.
In sum, I’d like to be doing something in nearly every public-facing category in which I’m interested. Maybe it won’t be a lot, but keeping my musical skills doing matters to me. Keeping my brain engaged on a wide variety of topics matters to me. Keeping my writing skills sharp matters to me. I cannot excel at all of those things, certainly—especially not if I wish to be a good husband and father! But keeping them active means keeping them from further atrophying, and that is something, at least. It will hopefully leave them more available to me for times in the future when I am able to dedicate more time to them.
If 2014 and 2013 were both years in which I focused primarily on software—and all to the good!—then I hope 2015 will be a year in which I am able to broaden out again and focus on a wider variety of things!
You’ll note that there really aren’t any purely personal goals on this list. Not to worry: I have them, and I intend to formalize them in the next couple of days. But one of the things I have learned over the many years I have been blogging is that not everything needs to be public. Some things can be; indeed, some should be. Some things may be public but need not, and yet others should not be public. Right now, I am choosing to leave quite a few things in the “may be need not” category private. (This direction, I can always change my mind later. It’s essentially impossible to do the opposite in the internet era.)