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Ask HN: What do you look forward to doing in 2018?
I'm particularly looking forward to sitting down and strengthening my understanding of computer science topics, including networking and operating systems. I also want to delve more into mathematics and understand its rigor better.
- imrat 9y agoIn 2018 i will learn how to program & write transactions for bitcoin.
- protomok 9y agoI’ve also been learning about crypto currencies lately. One thing I found helpful was implementing the popular proof of work algorithms. I did a sha256 python implementation , it was quite fun.
- corporateslave3 9y agoI'm looking to enjoy life and my youth, I'm seeking to overcome the shackles of striving for wealth and enjoy my time here
- w0uld 9y agoI'm looking forward to contributing more code to open source projects. I haven't prioritized it as much as I feel I should in years past, and many of those projects play an integral role in my life.
- 0xcoffee 9y agoFor 2017 I dropped all tech goals and focused 100% on relationships. I learned a lot about myself in the process, and for 2018 I hope to correct some of the social mistakes I keep making. Also, starting my first real job.
- hoodoof 9y agoI'd be interested to hear more about what's going on that has led to these life changes?
- 0xcoffee 9y agoThe short version is that loneliness is crippling me, whereas in the past I used to find comfort in technology. For whatever reason this comfort is gone, and I long for human contact. However by nature I am very introverted. Not socially anxious, just I get extremely tired around people, and in general can't hold a conversation about any non-tech topic. Also I am a cold/distant person with relative little emotions, not sure why. The couple of friends I had were similar to me, and we can be comfortably cold together. However I work with very warm and caring people from diverse backgrounds, and recognize that I love the qualities they posses. Rather then be happy with who I am, I figured it must be possible to 'train' emotions, so that I become an overall more positive person. However as a result I now attend around at least 1 social event a week, which goes ok. But sometimes if there are multiple events planned close to each other, my sociability drops off a cliff, but I have trouble recognizing when it happens. Not sure if I should dial back and be happy with the progress I made, or keep going and try to focus on breaking this sociability wall I am hitting.
- dhubris 9y agoHave you considered that you may fall into the ASD range of Asperger? I mention this because what you described ticks a couple of the common traits. Understanding yourself better can help with your goals. Best of luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome
- codebolt 9y agoSpeaking from personal experience, pushing yourself to socialize more is the way to go. At least it worked wonders from me. In my mid-twenties I changed from being a hermit to going out several times a week and continuously meeting a lot of new people. Now in my thirties I'm married with kids, and I don't think I would've ended up where I am now had it not been for me taking a much more proactive stance to my own personal development. It sounds cliche, but in my experience it is never too late to change your own psychology and behaviors, but it does take a lot of work and persistence.
- pentium10 9y agomore speaking opportunities about coversational gui, bigquery etc...
- ianleeclark 9y agoI'm starting a new job. Full-time remote, so I'm very excited (even ordered a Herman Miller, so my back is equally excited)! I'll also be working in Elixir + React, so both two technologies I'm very interested in. I typically assign myself two large projects a year to delve deep into to topics I'm ignorant in, so I'm going to attempt to build two low-level networking services. One is a TOR router and the other is a userland TCP/IP stack--I'm crazy excited to send a successful request to google.
- leetbulb 9y agoHave fun! If it's your first time full-time remote, please invest some time in to researching and optimizing your time management and work-life balance techniques and habits. Working remote for over six years now and the first couple of years were very rough for me because I let everything consume my life. If you need any advice, feel free to hit me up @gmail :)
- jonnycoder 9y agoHow did you get your remote job?
- ianleeclark 9y agoSaw their post on weworkremotely or remoteok, applied, and interviewed :) I have a few non-trivial open source projects (a torrent tracker and a distributed key-value store) and two small side-businesses (one of which is built in Elixir + Phoenix and the other went under a rewrite to that stack). Showing that I can ship products tends to get me in the door, but a combination of luck, personality, and technical know-how moves me forward in the interview process.
- tomcooks 9y agoStart a few companies to fix what i don't like about my homecountry, starting from public healthcare and smuggling.
- jstanley 9y agoWhat don't you like about smuggling? Smuggling is just free trade without waiting for your government to negotiate free trade agreements.
- tomcooks 9y agoLet's say it depends on the goods you smuggle. If it's food, like my grandmother smuggling cheese and rice across borders to feed her family, i'm 101% happy to support free markets. If it's corporation money and weapons whom do you think gets a bribe? Spoiler: the government officials you despise.
- catchmeifyoucan 9y agoI want to read more books. Bought a kindle
- allenliuzihao 9y ago1. reading books across all areas (humanities; science) 2. getting to know myself better 3. continue journey in theoretical CS 4. achieve good impact at work
- swlkr 9y agoLess code time and more outdoors time
- drivingmenuts 9y agoGetting a job. 6 months of interviewing and nothing. I'm starting to feel like I've been blackballed.
- mherrmann 9y agoWorking on my file manager and passion project: https://fman.io https://fman.io
- alexnewman 9y agoI have sold two companies and am not super rich, but now I can live off my investments. I have dedicated my life to helping the world with OSS. This year I intend on releasing a project which will enable academics to have access to labeled image datasets more than 100x
- cottonseed 9y agoHow did you decide to work on image datasets? What else did you consider?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- danielecook 9y agoI’m finishing grad school. Looking forward to having a little more time to do whatever I want. I’ve got a bunch of projects I want to work on and a long list of books I’d like to read.
- neeleshs 9y agoMove back home from US to India. Build a small ginger beer plant, build a company around a half-ass data product, build a house! There is a never-ending supply of things I'm looking forward to do on any given day :)
- ahussain 9y agoSounds like you're living the life - I would love to build my own house one day
- protomok 9y agoI’m hoping to keep learning more about parallel computing and Deep Learning both from day job and some side projects. Planning to take a stab at a crypto currency algo implementation like Equihash as a fun side project.
- wcarron 9y agoI've been wondering if adopting an agile framework for my life will help me accomplish my goals. So I have. Starting a little early for resolutions but in this sprint I hope to establish stronger flossing and exercise habits. Larger goals for the year include establishing a stronger financial base, learning to weld (and perhaps getting my certification), to cook the vast majority of my meals at home, and finally breaking the habit of biting my fingernails, which has plagued me since I could talk. Oh, and go to Yosemite again. I've wanted to go back for years, ever since I went there as a child on a family vacation.
- cpeterso 9y agoGetting Things Done (GTD) is probably the most popular personal agile-like process. I highly recommend reading the first book. It was a real eye opener for me, but beware: it is easy for people to get too focused on optimizing their "perfect" GTD system and tools. Just keep it simple. :)
- SirLJ 9y agoTo go spent the summer vacationing in Europe with the family and meet with some old friends... Usually it's a blast!
- sjrd 9y agoPublishing Scala.js [1] version 1.0.0 final, obviously. ;) [1] https://www.scala-js.org/ https://www.scala-js.org/
- igotsideas 9y agoStart a side hustle and learn Golang
- danieldk 9y ago1. Do fun things with my wife and daughter. 2. I switched to from Linux to macOS on the desktop in ~2007. I am now back to Linux on my home machine. I decided to stop complaining about bugs/problems and instead try to report every bug/problem that I encounter, when possible with a minimal test case, and a patch. So far, I have reported a small number of GNOME bugs and I hope to complain less and report/fix more in 2018. I am looking forward to this, because it benefits me and may help other people. 3. I work in a computational linguistics department and have teaching duties. Next semester, I will be teaching a 'low-level natural language processing' course using Rust. I have been using (and like) Rust for NLP-related projects, so the course will be fun. Also, I am looking forward to see to see how much students will like Rust. 4. Meditating more. I used to meditate a lot, including doing retreats. With a young child, it will be difficult to do full retreats, but it would be great to sit 10-15 minutes per day again. 5. Recently, an indoor climbing center opened close to us. My wife is planning to do a course, so that we can climb together as a family. (I used to climb ~twice a week for 5 years.)
- gallerdude 9y agoDamn, computational linguistics sounds amazing.
- mandliya 9y agoRust NLP course sounds super interesting. I am dabbling in Rust. Could you share details/course links when it is available. Thanks
- hockeybias 9y agoFishing. Lots of it. With Tenkara rods recommended by Chris at TenkaraBum.com
- ryanmarsh 9y agoLaunching a few very small software products to begin replacing my consulting income so I can quit being an agile coach which I have grown to dislike greatly.
- spicymaki 9y agoDoing more recreational math.
- dev1n 9y agoLove this one. I picked up euclid's elements over the summer and it has been awesome to just pick up a proof when I have minimal down time. great way to redirect my mind.
- brian-armstrong 9y agoI'm looking forward to releasing documentation, creating proper release versions and fixing some various bugs for my open source project Quiet Modem. I'm also hoping to blog a bunch about how it works. Hard to believe I started working on it over 2 years ago.
- mbrock 9y agoCooking, cleaning, meditating, and generally making sure my life and home are peaceful and promote baseline happiness. Taking time to study some beautiful theory that is also applicable to my interests in programming: category theory, logic, and proof systems. Continuing my daily work with fun technologies like Nix, Haskell, Ethereum, Racket, and so on. Going away for a work retreat with some remote colleagues.
- RivieraKid 9y agoWhen planning how to utilize my time, I sometimes think in terms of these three categories: make, learn, fun. So: Make: finish a side project I'm working on. After that, start a new project with a completion time of, say, about four months with the hope that some will become successful or provide unexpected indirect value such as getting to know interesting people etc. Learn: continually learn stuff so that I cover roughly undergraduate understanding of all of the major branches of science: physics, biology, economics, chemistry, etc. For fun and because it's rewarding and useful to understand the fundamentals of a wide range of fields. Useful because when there's some specialized area of interest, understanding the fundamentals makes it possible to learn about it relatively quickly. Fun: travel more, maybe try LSD :) Other than that, get a significant raise and/or start looking for a much better paying job. The job market in my country is extremely favourable for employees right now, so I'm basically wasting a big opportunity out of fear of change. Also, slack less in work (that's the reason I haven't asked for a raise yet).
- notamy 9y agoFinding a job. I'm in that awkward stage between "finishing uni" and "finding a job" and I'm starting to get (overly?) anxious about it.
- busterarm 9y agoI'm switching jobs to a similarly-paying, but less demanding role with no commute (vs 3 total hours daily right now). At the same time, I'm establishing a business entity on the side. The goal for this entity is to use my extra time and focus my learning in a way that generates income. I initially plan to do part-time consulting and I have a client lined up, but long term my goal is to develop a stable income working on open source software in areas where I'm interested. If I am shrewd and lucky this will become my primary source of income.
- matte_black 9y agoIn 2018 I hope to master the full planche pushup.
- bambataa 9y ago* Start contributing to open source projects. This feels quite overdue. * Try and buy no new books until I read all the unread ones I already have.
- avenoir 9y ago1. Buy land & build a log cabin. I've been planning this for a year now. Finally have some money saved and now looking for land bordering a National Forest in my area. 2. Deploy my SAAS project on AWS. I've spent last few months learning how to script out stacks in AWS and run an ECS cluster. Just need to wrap this up.
- codebolt 9y agoI'm enthusiastic about finishing a project I helped start at work, which involves migrating tens of thousands of lines of complex and undocumented VB6 code into a functionally equivalent C# program. I get a kick out of doing things that seem against the odds and others would deem hopeless.
- alexissantos 9y agoMaking my consulting company sustainable for the long term. 2017 was about getting up on our feet, 2018 is about figuring out how to keep work coming our way. I'm particularly looking forward to it because it finally feels like I'm doing work I'm uniquely able to do.
- MattGrommes 9y agoI consider learning new programming techniques as a normal part of my career so my personal goals are usually more about crafting and non-coding side projects. My main goals for this year are beefing up the skills needed for making cool stuff on my laser cutter, learning to sew and learning welding. My family is also working on building our crafting business, finally putting things online to sell and going to craft fairs.
- module0000 9y agoTrade more [futures], write less code. I've been slowly transitioning out of IT and into a full-time trader. It would be great if 2018 was the year I didn't bill a single hour in the IT world.
- dzink 9y agoExperiment with different ways to accept and process multi-layered "needs" for users. From text strings, to visual interface, to autosuggest. Trying sentence breakdown structure, with word2vec, topic breakdowns, graphs. Do you have suggestions on the most accurate NLP or best UX interfaces, or best storage architecture to try?
- globe1337 9y agoFocusing on learning more about tech in general, dedicating myself to some coding projects (right now I'm looking at Crafting Interpreters - http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/introduction.html http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/introduction.html), getting back into music and being more social overall.
- eccstartup 9y agoI hope that people would understand one single truth: AI isn't everything.
- sudshekhar 9y agoI recently transitioned from a Software engineering to Product Management role. So, learning these new skills(design/communication/planning) and improving at the job will be my top priority. My current plan is to read a lot of books and focus on my writing skills. Other goal is to keep my tech chops up to date (so I can easily move back if I don't like this role).
- bewe42 9y agoGoing full-time with my cloud security and compliance service offering. The big goal is to bring someone on board and shift my focus to the business/strategy side.
- ninjavis 9y ago1. Learning Hebrew 2. Launching my own blog to teach others how to make an income from crypto currencies automatically like I do. 3. Spending way more time outdoors and on adventures. 4. Improving my relationship skills. 5. Finishing my SaaS side project and launching it.
- on_and_off 9y agoI moved to San Francisco from France recently. So I have a very long list of things to do : - finish furnish my apartment so it starts feeling like home. - start working out - take cooking lessons - volunteering : the gap between the poor and rich leaves a sour taste when you arrive here. It also exists in my origin country (France) but it is just so much worse here. - I am not really looking forward to anything tech related. Tech work starts looking like more of the same to be honest.