Wrapping Up the Year

With seven days left in the year, I think it’s safe to do a retrospective on my goals:

• Finish one of the children’s books I’ve been writing off and on for the last few years: nope.

• Sell one short story: nope.

• Wrap up the Python version of Software Design by Example: it has gone off to the printer, and should be available by April, but I no longer believe in the project. The JavaScript version has sold fewer than 300 copies in its first year, and most of those were to institutions that buy one or two copies of every new book from my publisher. I enjoyed teaching the Python material online, but working through examples as a way of learning software design doesn’t seem to appeal to as many people as I hoped it would.

• Help organize another series of lightning talks for It Will Never Work in Theory: yup, but we then wound the project down. I don’t know what it will take to get programmers and researchers to listen to one another, but NWIT hasn’t worked, and any attempt to keep it going right now would be trampled in the AI goldrush. We have written a two-page “lessons learned” on the project that we hope will appear in one of the IEEE journals some time next year.

• Refurbish my dad’s reclining chair: yup. I’m sitting in it now…

• Terrace the back half of our back yard: nope, but we did get some new windows in and finished renovations to the kitchen and bathroom.

• Pick up another musical instrument: nope. Between the tenosynovitis in my right hand and wrist pain in my left, the only instrument I could possibly play right now is the trombone, and I don’t think my family and neighbors would appreciate it.

A few other things happened this year that weren’t planned:

• My daughter got her black belt in karate. It has taken ten years, and she’s had to overcome recurrent back problems, but we are very proud of her.

• My wife and I joined a Rainbow Railroad team that is helping a Ugandan lesbian immigrate to Canada in order to escape state-sponsored violence in her own country.

• I appeared in Episode 460 of the Embedded.fm podcast.

• I made two abortive attempts to restart a book on software engineering that uses topics like “how to run a meeting” and “how to do performance evaluations” to motivate discussion of professional responsibility, (un)fairness at work, and other things that most books on the subject ignore. Turns out, I still don’t know enough to write this.

• The Carpentries laid off half their staff. I have only been peripherally involved with the organization since stepping down in 2017, but this still hurt.

So what about 2024?

• I want to run the teaching workshop a few more times, both to raise money for Rainbow Railroad and because it makes me feel useful.

• I want to find something to learn that excites me. A new musical instrument is out because of my hand; I’ve thought about reviving my French, picking up some Spanish, diving into Postgres or machine learning (yeah, yeah, I know, don’t hate me), but none of them are making my heart race.

• Terrace the back yard, fix the concrete in the front, and throw out a third of what’s in our basement.

• Finally, I want to finish one of those children’s books and get it published. In aid of that, I’d like to find a writing group in Toronto—I was briefly part of one twenty years ago, but it no longer exists and the all-comers meetups I’ve tried have been pretty scattershot. This would partly be a way to keep myself honest about writing, but I’m also increasingly concerned about becoming socially isolated: I talk to fewer people in a normal week than I did before COVID, and if I don’t make an effort, I worry that the trend will continue downward.