Last and New Year Resolutions

It's the start of a new year (2018) and it's the time where people write about their past year's achievements. A lot has happen last year with new changes this year, one for which is a new job. Now working for Expedia, previous at APNIC.

Last year I fulfilled my new year resolution to do at least 1 git commit a day. The aim was to achieve a 'green wall' in GitHub. At start of the year I was committing code everyday, and at times I would just do a readme change and classify that as a commit. There was nothing wrong with that. I still got my green box.

Digging around on GitHub looking at projects, I came across users who have automated commits in their projects. This got me thinking, why don't I come up with a project that can do the same. And that's when the IP Daily Digest came around.

Last year I was working for an organisation called APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Center) which a Regional Internet address Registry (RIR). They deal with everything to do with IP addresses and delegations. I became interested in what we do so I thought that it would be a good idea to work on a project that would help me better understand the organisation and community. Since they have a huge amount of public data dumped into their public FTP I went ahead and tried to grasp an understanding of the delegations. Decoupling this information I thought it would be a good idea to provide a daily summary of the delegations that happen everyday for all 5 RIRs. Because this project required to have a snapshot each day, it would mean my commitment to committing everyday manually will fade away and I'll be able to achieve the green wall without effort.

Statistics

Some statistics of the past year:

Created 19 Repositories
9 of 11 GitHub projects completed
600+ Commits

The past year I focused writing code and creating projects. I do love creating projects, but 2018 is not going to be about that anymore.

2018 Resolutions

This year is all about research. It's time to put aside projects and focus on research and learning. I'm not going to prohibit myself from creating projects, but having done 9 in my own time did push me a bit overboard. For me to improve and develop my skills I need to get a better understanding of things. I'm more of a do and learn on the way, but I'm going to change it up and spend the year in development through research.

To achieve what I've said my goals for 2018 are:

write an article/post once a week
read 6 books (non-fiction)
read 730 articles (2 articles a day)

The list I believe is reachable, once I set in the habit I'm good. I look forward to seeing the results.