Year 2018 in review
I’m going to make another year in review post. This will be a really short one.
Work
Doing really well. Here are some chocolates my client gave me:
I’m very proud of my work in 2018, and I expect to be doing great work in 2019 as well.
Machine learning
I finished my Udacity Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree!
That was back in October, but I’ll write about my experience soon.
You can check out my capstone project here (it’s pretty cool): https://toxicity.yoongkang.com
Of course, I’m not stopping there. I’m still studying a lot on my own, particularly with the fast.ai course on deep learning which is terrific and teaches the cutting edge.
So, hopefully this leads to a niche I can work with, rather than just being “a programmer”. That being said, there are quite a few machine learning practitioners and researchers in Australia, so I’ll need an angle to differentiate myself.
Health
Not much improvement. I’m disappointed with myself for failing in this area, as it’s arguably the most important aspect.
In 2019, my goals are to consistently sleep more, eat well, exercise.
This will need to take absolute priority this year, and I won’t let work get in the way.
Side business
Last year, I wrote about some ideas I had about getting some side income.
Yeah, I didn’t actually abandon it.
It turns out I didn’t fully understand my audience yet, so I spent a little bit of time in Django forums and subreddits. I think I understand my target audience a bit better now, and how to help them.
The other hesitation I have is that I’m not sure I want to be a “Django guy” anymore. I like Django, but there are other things I want to get into.
That being said, Django is where I have the highest chance of success for this kind of thing. And the point is to learn about marketing anyway, so I’ll stick with it.
So, I’m going to actually try to make that a reality in the next few months.
I also wrote about trying this without buying courses on doing exactly this. Yeah, so I’ve had a change of heart since then.
The reason for this is I realised I didn’t spend much money investing in myself – I didn’t spend anything, actually.
So, I’m going to buy that expensive course. The one I’m interested in launches on Wednesday, and I get a small discount for being on the waitlist. It’s really expensive, wish me luck!
Goals
I’m going to resist writing this section this time.
I always find that I don’t meet all of the goals, even if I had a reasonably good year. So putting this down only serves to make myself feel bad.