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🪞 2023, a year

Written by Brie Carranza

🪞 Reflections on my goals and accomplishments for the year.

🌊 Hello, world!

In March, I 📯 tooted:

If you want to have a cool “my 2023 year in review” post, now is a fantastic time to get on it. You have the first quarter of the year to reflect on and nine months of planning and execution left to do. 🚀

Over the course of the year, I:

  • kept track of some of the things I did in a private Google Doc.
  • continued my experimentation with various forms of public goal setting.

🎊 Excerpts from my ”✨ 2023 Year in Review 🦄” doc

  • 🚀 I published my pastebin-bisque project to PyPI from a rooftop in Amsterdam on my 🎂 birthday.
  • ✍️ I wrote a few things this year that I am particularly excited about:
  • 🏆 I completed the half marathon at the Pittsburgh Marathon and the entirety of the 10K of Hell Hath No Hurry.
  • 🌻 I had a successful flower garden. In addition to a healthy batch of sunflowers, I branched out and grew dwarf dahlias and nasturtiums this year.
  • 🐈 I published a quick early version of a utility in Go that solves a specific problem that I had: turning the output of gron into jq commands.

📼 LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE

I am extremely excited about the videos that went on YouTube this year. I got to interview a few of my colleagues:

Plus, you can watch me install and use pastebin-bisque in under a minute.

🌐 Progress on Public Goals

  • ✅ I decided to try blogging once per month in 2023. This is the tenth post of the year. I took a break from blogging while working on my garden: I am very happy with my progress.
  • ✅ After publishing pastebin-bisque, I wanted to keep the momentum up by setting out to 🚀 ship some wishlist improvements. I did it the next day. That wasn’t a super ambitious goal, it seems. That’s OK. Everything doesn’t have to be difficult.

🎁 2023 Wrapped

I visited a few cool countries this year: France, Germany, Mexico and The Netherlands. I spent time in a few neat cities in the US: Chicago, Philadelphia and Phoenix. I took a few lovely 🚂 train rides through Europe and 🛫 I flew 19,237 miles in 2023.

🎧 Hands down, my top musical artists were Gojira and Mastodon. I 🎸 went to see them on the Mega Monsters tour in August.

🎬 The best movie I watched this year was Baby Driver.

🐈‍⬛ Motivation

I was really torn on whether publishing this as a blog post made sense. I already have the Google doc and the publicly set goals. What’s the point of writing all of this up?

The Google Doc was just a list of items without even these brief notes about how excited these accomplishments made me feel. I wanted to capture that information in order to have it and because I always appreciate looking back at things I’ve written. Being able to link back to this kind of stuff has been super helpful this year. Working in public raises the bar for the quality of what I write but it does make deep reflection a bit more difficult. I’m happy with this tradeoff because I do like being able to easily share this kind of information with others. I’ve also heard often from folks who have read and enjoyed my blog posts. I’ve always hoped that others would find my writing helpful. Knowing that it does makes me happy so I won’t stop. Lastly, being more vulnerable in the open has made me a stronger and better person.

Goal setting can be tricky. Well-constructed goals can be motivational and help with accountability. It’s easy for goals to become traps. Be honest and kind with yourself. Stick to your goals to the extent that they serve you. Be free to outgrow your old goals and embrace exciting new ones.

💖 Be well.

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