Goals Lookback 2015

At the end of each year I make a list of goals for the next year to come. Usually I blog these and start of with “I’m planning to blog more…” and then read that same blog post again in the same situation the following year.

Last year instead I made a spreadsheet with some things I wanted to accomplish and tracked my progress toward them. Now I’m looking back on those as I plan my goals for 2016 and thought it might be a good idea to do an evaluation of what I did or did not achieve.

The 2015 list goes like this:

1. Finish Kraken Website
2. Release Kraken Android
3. Release Kraken iOS
4. Take Flying Lessons
5. Try Scuba Diving
6. Release TTAnalytics
7. Release TTLeaderboards
8. Update Personal Website
9. Finish Projector Website
10. Save £6,000
11. Visit Family More

Lets take these in groups.

Kraken

Kraken is a project I’ve been working on for some time. It initially began as a way for me to get some experience using Backbone.js but I thought the idea had some commercial potential so I set up a company to release it under.

Kraken did actually come close to release. I tested it with a few friends and ultimately felt it wasn’t quite the polished product I wanted it to be. Rather than release, I started working on improvements. Inevitably that delayed the release and it never made it out of the door.

The big thing that I was banking on for Kraken was that Android Auto/iCar would be standalone hardware and software. Rather than work in a similar way to Android Wear/Apple Watch where a phone is required to pair with, I thought these would be their own self contained systems with access to GPS, 3G/4G and the Play/App store. If that became a reality then Kraken could fit straight onto these devices and be the solution for tracking and recovery of stolen vehicles.

As it turned out that both Android and Apple’s offerings for car infotainment were reliant upon a mobile phone, the commercial potential for Kraken didn’t feel as relevant. I do still believe it is a good idea but it becomes harder to stand out against the competitors like Cerberus or HiddenApp. As Kraken is intended to work on mobile phones, tablets and laptops I do think it still has potential to stand out as a one-stop theft tracking solution rather than using multiple providers that target specific platforms. With the constant feeling of it not being as polished as I wanted and the deflation I felt at my gamble on Android/Apple not paying off, I stagnated on this project and it failed to get released for any platform.

Flying

Ever since I was a child I’ve always felt that I wanted to fly. Growing up our favourite board game was “The Game of Life” and I’d try my best to get the pilot career. I felt motivated last year to start on my way to achieving my PPL so I did fly just to make sure it was something I really wanted to do. Following on from that I had to crunch the numbers and it just didn’t make financial sense. It’s an expense I can’t quite afford to meet at the moment so I parked this idea for a future time.

Diving

Honestly I made the least progress on this than anything else. Diving always seemed like an interesting hobby that I wanted to try. It’s also a great hobby of my sister so it would be great to go out together on dives. In January it became evident that I wouldn’t be seeing my sister again until December so this one started to fall down the scale of priority. It would have still been great to experience but I kept putting it off until it was too late. I regret not achieving this one, which is why it made it onto the 2016 list too.

TTAnalytics/TTLeaderboards

It feels like I spent a lot of time working on TTAnalytics. The intention was to create an analytic interface for using in Unity projects and then write plugins for all the major analytic providers. Anyone could then use those providers through the TTAnalytics system.

From releasing some other projects with a lot of analytic tracking in, we realised that the data usage started to become a serious problem. We ended up reducing the amount of analytic tracking and the number of providers being used. With that in mind, TTAnalytics encouraging use of many providers didn’t seem like a good idea any more.

The other advantage of this project which we could still push, was that it eased the transition from one analytic provider to another. As all events are sent to the TTAnalytics manager and then dispatched to the provider, changing between two providers was as simple as pressing a button.

The real issues began when Google Analytics started going in. At that point there were probably 5 or 6 other providers and everything was fine, but Google Analytics works in such a different way to the rest, it became quite complicated keeping the interface consistent. There were a whole bunch of extension methods designed specifically to get Google Analytics data working that we could no longer claim transition between networks was easy.

TTLeaderboards was intended to be developed following TTAnalytics. Though Facebook leaderboards were implemented, this needs a lot more work before it is at the stage where it can be released. Before that happens TTAnalytics needs to be salvaged, by providing only a subset of Google Analytics features or removing that provider altogether.

Personal & Projector Websites

I did remake my portfolio website this year, with the intention of adding all of the other projects completed throughout the year onto it. Unfortunately as mentioned above, not a lot of those projects ended up in a state fit to be shown on a portfolio. Still, this task is one I managed to complete.

Projector’s website was to be built after Kraken came out. During the final stages before testing out Kraken I decided the time would be better spend on the product than on a company website, given the company only has the 1 product anyway. I set the domain to point to Kraken and called this one done.

Save £6,000

This one was achieved, in a way. Throughout the course of the year I was putting away money each month to get to this goal. Happily I did reach it, although only for a brief moment. About a month after hitting the target I went and spent the whole lot on a new car. So although I can say I did hit the explicit goal of saving £6k, I didn’t really achieve the intention of the goal which was to still have that money saved in the bank. Buying the car has enabled me to do other things that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced though, which in my opinion is much more valuable than money anyway.

Visit Family More

Throughout 2014 I felt as though I didn’t see my family very much. Perhaps partly because my sister spent the whole year out of the country but also that I didn’t make the trip up to see my parents all that often.

In 2015 I saw my sister only two times. The first, when we dropped her off at the airport and then 11 months later when she visited for 2 weeks. I’d set myself a goal of seeing family on 12 different occasions, so basically once per month. Happily I actually overachieved on this one and visited them a few more times than my minimum target. A lot of those occasions were just weekends but I got a few visits in for longer and overall a great improvement over 2014. Things are looking even better for the coming year as well.

A lot of those things I aimed to achieve over 2015 actually ended up unfinished or not even attempted. Life is unpredictable and took me off in a few directions I wasn’t expecting, so I still achieved a great deal that I had actually not planned for.

• We moved house
• I bought a new car
• We travelled, which I thought I wasn’t going to get to do at all this year
• We fostered a cat and 4 kittens and helped get them used to humans
• We fostered another cat and ended up keeping her