Plans for the Year

I’ve written about what I did in 2022 and six seven eight nine things I’m not going to do in 2023; here’s what I plan hope to accomplish in the coming year.

• Finish one of the books on this list and sell at least one short story. The first tip in this article explains why I write technical books; I write fiction because I want my daughter to be able to hear my voice after I’m gone, and half-done sketches won’t do that as well as something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
• Wrap up the Python version of Software Design by Example. I have three chapters to finish and then a ton of revising to do, but as you may have gathered from recent grumbles (1, 2, 3), the further I get, the more dissatisfied with I am with the ways we have to present material like this. All the solutions are on the to-don’t list mentioned in the opening paragraph of this post, though, so I’m just going to plow through and ship it.
• Help organize another series of lightning talks for It Will Never Work in Theory. I no longer believe that these will change how computer science is taught—not in my lifetime, anyway—but I’ve learned a lot from the speakers we’ve had so far, and it’s been a good way to make some new acquaintances.
• Refurbish my dad’s reclining chair, which now looks like something salvaged from the side of the road. It would be much cheaper to replace it, but sometimes, late at night or early in the morning, I still imagine I can smell my dad’s cigarettes when I sit in this one.
• Terrace the back half of our back yard. We took 1700lb of junk out of the soil when we moved in (I know because you pay by weight for disposal here in Toronto); between that and building garden boxes we ran out of steam, but a couple of weeks of spadework and about 250 blocks of rough-cut stone and we’d have something worth planting on.
• Pick up another musical instrument. Too much typing on shallow, hard-strike laptop keyboards has given me tenosynovitis in my right hand, which has put paid to my attempts to learn guitar. (I’m left-handed, so I chord with my right.) I picked up the sax again for a few months in 2022, but that felt like moving backward rather than forward. I’ve been thinking about the handpan—I’d be a very happy man if I could do any of this—but I’ve always enjoyed playing music with other people rather than on my own, and we’re not out of COVID yet…

Part of me feels like I should have more plans than these, but I’ve always over-planned and under-delivered. This year I’d like to set my sights a little lower and hit more of my targets. I’ll let you know in twelve months how that went.