Goals for 2011

It's traditional, at least in my culture, to create goals, or resolutions, at the start of a new year. The new year is seen as a restart, a new beginning, and it's a handy time to start new goals. It's common.

So, not wanting to break with tradition, I feel I should record my goals for 2011. These are the goals I've spent some time thinking about, so I feel they are more meaningful then simply "Eat better, make more money, etc."

Expand on the DuctMail concept. DuctMail was fun, and I still use it, but it could be so much more. The flaw in DuctMail is a flaw in myself: information management. It's hard to handle so much information, and most systems that want you to use them for information management require you to learn how they do things. DuctMail doesn't try to do this. However, it needs more work. I need to set aside time to do this. DuctMail could be turned into a side business, so I need to force myself to make this a side business.

Build 2NaW.com. 2NaW.com, or 2 Nights a Week is built up around a simple idea. I should note that the idea was inspired by reading this posting from HN about LetsPocket.com. Basically, the idea comes from something the poster said in his post: "I coded relentlessly every chance I could (which amounted to a mere 1-2 nights a week)." The idea is simple. Far too often projects get abandoned because people feel they aren't making progress. However, countless times projects pop up from people who have spent a little extra time each week working on a project. 2NaW.com is going to encourage people to do just this. How? I don't know. However, I want something that caters to the hacker who has a family, has a life, has little free time, but wants to find a way to get his hacking done. Also, it being a 4 character domain makes it fun. And the name sounds like 'tuna'.

Outside of building these two sites, I also want to really learn another language. By that, I mean I want to make a second language apart of my toolbox. Far too long I've relied on PHP to do most of my grunt work. While I'm not afraid of other languages, anything I had to do was usually done easiest with PHP. The danger here is that most anything I have planned for this year is stuff I can already do in PHP. Which begs the question: what language should I learn? I don't need to learn a language for my career. However, I think I should spend some time learning Lisp. It's popular enough to make it useful, yet esoteric enough to make it a little more unique. Ruby is also up there as something I should learn. It's practical enough that it can have an impact on my career in the future. Still not sure. Must decide soon!

Finally, I must contribute more. Contribute both in terms of blog posts with interesting ideas, as well as to projects. I can blog about my other goals and how they are going. Projects will be through code I release via these two projects. I also must contribute back to the communities I use so much, so I should venture to contribute to HN and Reddit. On the Reddit side, I've already started that, so hopefully that will seem some positive results. On the HN side, I'll have to contribute with information about my above goals.

I have some other goals, but they are of the more personal side, and will not be sharing them with you, dear blog reader. My wife, however, knows what they are. They aren't bad things, mind you. Merely goals. Not to correct wrongs, but to make our lives better in the long run. We've already started this, and maybe I'll write about them in the future.

We'll see.