Taking Stock of My 2015

At the end of 2014, I wrote down a summary of that year and my outlook for 2015. Now the time has come again — to look back on 2015 and look ahead to 2016.

In 2014 I did well on my three big goals:

1. Relocate to Silicon Valley (on the verge of departure)
2. Write a book (The Travel Circle Startup Diary, roughly 140,000 Chinese characters)
3. Run one full marathon (finished the Beijing Marathon in 4:48)

The small goals, by and large, barely made a cameo appearance.

My three big goals for 2015:

1. Get my status and housing settled, and learn to live like a local (mostly done)
2. Finish the book under contract with a publisher (right now I’m in a mad scramble on the Caltrain every day)
3. Learn a new skill (during the days when my wife and kid were back in China, I nearly got a sailing license — it died an early death for various reasons…)

Some smaller goals:

1. Run at least one marathon (Portland Marathon — 5:17)
2. Take the kid to the library once or twice a month and to two early-education classes (um… if you count my wife’s contribution, we take the kid to the library several times a week, to a museum once or twice, and he’s now in preschool three days a week)
3. Take the family on at least one local outing a month, and a medium-to-long trip on each long holiday (we’ve grown tired of local outings by now; on long holidays we headed north as far as Seattle and south as far as San Diego; New York, which was on the plan, we didn’t dare attempt; Hawaii got cancelled as too expensive; Yellowstone needed more time and slipped to next year; and worst of all, I may have no time at all in 2016…)
4. Read 24 books (ashamed to say — not counting my own book, I finished only 5, and the one I’m about to finish is The Future of Management. When it comes to reading, I always vastly overestimate myself)
5. Attend one talk a week (fewer than 20 in total, I think; after I started working in San Francisco I rarely went, because whenever I did, the kid was already asleep by the time I got home)
6. Go to a few local events (one Erlang conference, one Docker hackathon, one AWS re:Invent, and some conference in San Francisco — forgot which)
7. Keep up morning runs with my wife and lose weight (yeah… let’s pretend I never said that… does once on the weekend count?)
8. Complete five Coursera/edX courses in full, at least two of them paid for with certificates (if you count Udemy and Frontend Masters, I’ve done seven or eight; and would a guy my age who spent $299 a year hanging out on Frontend Masters go around telling people about it…)
9. Finish An Introduction to the Racket Language and Dr. Qi’s Management Course (sweat! I’ve let down the readers of both books!)
10. Keep the WeChat public account and Zhihu column at 2–3 posts a week, 125+ for the year (so far I’ve written 75, averaging 1.5 a week)

I didn’t read many books — genuinely ashamed — but I more than made up for it with videos. Nearly every Rich Hickey talk I could find, the vast majority of this year’s Erlang Factory talks, the twenty or thirty AWS re:Invent 2015 sessions that interested me, plus all sorts of fascinating topics from Strange Loop — I listened to them all attentively. All told, I contributed at least a hundred hours of technical content on YouTube and Vimeo this year. There’s too much content and not enough time to watch it all, so I found a clever workaround: a Chrome extension that adjusts HTML5 video playback speed (YouTube has speed control built in, but many sites don’t). Default is 1.25x, and if that still feels slow, 1.5x. Think about it — an hour-long video takes only 40 to 48 minutes. That’s enough to make you smile even on a train.

Publication of The Travel Circle Startup Diary was already a done deal, so I didn’t put it on the list. Little did I expect how much homework I’d have to make up — a little laziness on my part cost me time, and it slipped all the way to a late-November release. Still, that’s another “first” in the bag.

My career has undergone an earth-shaking change — one I could never have predicted at the start of the year. For more details, see “It Was Meant to Be.”