My Belated Goals for 2022

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine!

Last Updated On: 2025-09-01 04:31:52 -0400

This is the first post that I’ve actually written within Bridgetown. That means that I now trust Bridgetown enough to actually create content within it. w00t!!! Now it likely won’t see the light of day until I finish my Jekyll to Bridgetown migration – at which point it will be vomited onto the Internet in a vast content explosion but I’m ok with that. As always, I write mostly for myself and then for others.

Normally this would be a January post that you write around the New Year but back in January I was still in my long slumber of, well, not doing very much with my life (I took a few years quasi off during the pandemic).

So here are my 2022 goals:

Make Some Money from a Product Not My Time. Create at least one thing that makes some actual money during 2022 or 2023 (yes I’m cutting myself some slack here with 2023).
Improve My Skills. Broaden my overall computer understanding into the hardware realm. I’m now hacking pretty furiously on an actual embedded hardware device in the spirit of PiBox and Tiny Pilot KVM. This is going to require dramatically improving ALL my skills.
Stop Compromising. I have a tendency to get things good enough and move on. That doesn’t always lead to optimal solutions.
Recognize that My Time is Valuable. Like a lot of startup folk, I tend to think “if I just make that contact, things will work out” and I do chase people a bit. I’m now entirely done with that model of life. For most people, I’ll try to engage one time and if it doesn’t work then I’m out.
Give Back to Open Source. I’m not sure yet how this is going to work - writing new stuff, contributing to other stuff, etc but I clearly need to do more.
Tweet More. Like the curmudgeon I can be (“get off my damn lawn”), I disregarded Twitter back in 2005 / 2006 “what can anyone say in 140 characters; I’m a blogger”. That’s what I thought and what I sneered. I was clearly wrong. Twitter, while not perfect, is a fantastic part of the Internet.
Speak At Conferences Again. It has been too damn long.
Do Good in the World. With Pizza for Ukraine, I’ve clearly done that. So at least one of these is firmly in the “at least partially done” category.
Ship Things. I have a history of mildly ADHD style interests where I go “Shiny” and spin up a prototype without thinking. This year I’m going to ship and I started with collectionselect.com which makes using the Rails CollectionSelect helper better.
Make Things Better. This year I’m going to be arrogant enough – not a jerk about it but creation inherently takes some arrogance – to say “this XYZ experience sucks and I CAN MAKE IT BETTER”.