Well I'm late but that's just to keep you all on tender hooks. Yes normally everyone else, including myself normally, does the year-end review and the "what's for the future" around the new year. It isn't like I didn't actually do it I just haven't had time to type it up. Actually doing the review and setting the aims was part of my thought process of improving the chances of achieving my aims.

so 2012

The company work will hopefully continue and will hopefully grow to allow us to start to take on employees.

On a personal note I have two aims.

I will properly learn two programming language this year, not sure which ones but if you have any suggestions, let me know. The second one for now I will keep to myself but I will update as things change with it.

Big change on the first one. I realised that the reason that I became self-employed was to offer flexibility. Don't get me wrong I know that to get something successful I am going to have to work hard and possibly long hours, sadly the direction that Sawdit was going in was what I had previously been doing in full-time employment, at the beck and call of users who believe the fact their finger print scanner to log in is the most important thing in the world at 1 am, even though their password is just password. I had been there and left that, so after a couple of months deliberation I made the decision to leave the business, this has moved onto my business partner at the time and is still running. As it was signed over and just thinking I could have a little bit of time to sort myself out, I only managed to be unemployed for a grand total of 6 hours. I was in between contracts and not even looking yet still managed to get myself employed, so much so that in November I took a full-time position there. As for the new business and where that's heading, lets just say its going to be very different!!

The two personal aims.

Coding, did get chunks of help on this as there was a big push on teaching people to code with sites such as code school and Mozilla trying to get everyone involved. I picked python in the end (after working with ruby and spending a lot of time with Perl devs) as my main choice while also wanting to get my PHP skill up to modern standards. I even went as far as taking a proper 10 week python gaming course. While I can't say I'm a dev (I think there is a different mind-set required as a dev compared to a sys admin) I am certainly getting better and using my skills a lot more in my new role. Also a few personal projects are happening in both python and PHP, all of which is useful of this coming year.

The unmentioned aim. Well that one was very successful and so far going exceptionally well ;)

2013.....

1. Set aims
2. Start project "want that"
3. Look at project "Crafty"
4. Get fit
5. Money
6. Coding
7. Make sure I spend time with the unmentioned aim from last year
8. Plan to relax

1 This comes from something that an old boss said and as I have got older I realise that its is actually very important. Not just for the next few weeks but months and years. I have recently realised that it is actually a way of helping me achieve more. This is the first thing on the list as I have seen how useful it was to me in the final months of 2012, it is also the basis for everything else that I have on the list. Not everything here is for this year but there is a sequence.

2 and 3, more to follow on those as they progress but hopefully it will be a little more entertainment for some of you, if not all of you. Through these projects we should hopefully see my love of gadgets, making things and crafts come through.

4 Back to the running as this is the only thing that's easy to measure, so last year (much helped by the Cardiff half) I managed it average 5K per week. The year before it was 6K so that's what I'm going for at a minimum. Looking to throw in some swimming and more biking!!

5 This is all about getting debts cleared while also getting investments in the right place to allow me to have some cash when I need it.

6 Ties in with the projects but also keeping me focused. As we are already 3 months into this year this is the one that has been most successful so far. Work provided the perfect platform to continue my Python learning, having to build an entire backend processing piece, I have also signed up to do a fully marked, supported and monitored course with O'Reilly to help with the learning. Other projects I'm using PHP, with a book to support me a refresh the knowledge from all the years ago that I last used it in fury. As with the others more of them as they develop. I have made some of them small and simple enough that I can try them with any other languages or use them to help learn other things.

7 and 8 both fit together. Spending time with the gorgeous other half but also, with everything that I have lined up, trying to spend some time relaxing.

So there we have it what happened and what I'm going for. At least this year I have aims that are mostly on going, allowing everything that gets in the way to fit in. Hopefully I can keep everyone updated with whats happening here and I hope it will be useful to at least a few people.