Hello 2021
nipafx news #83–24th of January 2021
Happy new year everyone,
everybody ready to take on 2020, part 2? Sorry, I mean 2021, of course. Although the first few months will surely feel a lot more like 2020 than the years before that. (I wrote this intro on December 31st — call it premonition.) Shit, why am I talking about 2020 again?! This damn year!
deep breath
Ok, 2021, let’s make some plans!
This is the second half of the turn-of-the-year newsletters, focusing on my plans for 2021. December’s warnings on self-centeredness fully apply.
I send this newsletter out some Sundays. Or other days. Sometimes not for weeks. But as an actual email. So, subscribe!
Approach to 2021
Every year I pick a motto for my professional endeavors, a headline for the year, so to speak, but I’ve started to question how much sense that still makes. Initially, there was some progression there:
- 2014 — Getting Started: first contributions to open source, set up the blog, start writing
- 2015 — Stabilization: sustain a constant pace of blogging and FOSS coding
- 2016 — Expansion: go beyond blogging and try new things
Since then, it seems to have devolved into wishful just-do-it thinking:
- 2017 — Focus: finish what you started
- 2018 — Laying the Foundation: launch online courses (I didn’t)
- 2019 — All the Things: produce content on whichever channel, but regularly (I hardly did)
- 2020 — Follow Through: follow through on the regular content (I mostly didn’t)
My wishful thinking for 2021 is still the same: regular content. I think we can take that as a given but what’s the point of wrapping it into yet another motto that reads like a motivational fridge magnet?
No Motto
So maybe I need to be more specific with more concrete goals that I can pursue? Leaving aside that I’m not that kind of person, it would also run the risk of either stifling creativity or quickly becoming pointless. If I come up with silly ideas like the 25-hour live stream, should I not do that because I need the time to pursue my other, apparently very concrete goals or should I drop them? If the latter, what was the point?
No, I think the problem isn’t really with the specific motto, but the concept of an annual motto in general. Mottos are like names for sprints, but what I need at this point is a Kanban board. Now that I say that out loud (figuratively speaking), I wonder whether it’s coincidence that two of my central projects at the moment use such boards (JUnit Pioneer and nipafx.dev)) and that I’m considering a similar approach to organizing the discovery, exploration, and sharing of new Java features. Interesting…
But Kanban boards aside, I still need a frame and phrase to capture what I’m about to go for. Not so much because having the frame/phrase itself is important but because I already have an impetus of what I want to do in the coming months and putting that into words seems worth the effort. But it can be neither too concrete nor too general.
Yes Themes
Hey, remember CGP Grey’s video on themes? He talks about how picking a theme for a year (e.g. health, reading, gratitude, etc.) helps you make decisions in line with that theme. The examples given in the video are very general and don’t apply well to the professional-only section of my life we’re talking about here, but I like the overall idea. Since creating content is the overarching goal, maybe I can look for themes therein.
This plays very well into another thought I had a while back. With a blog and newsletter, YouTube and Twitch channels, regular conference talks and courses, there’s a bunch of things that I do just so-so and that I could get much better at. Better writing, better lighting, better phrasing, better pacing.
Also very interesting is the seasonal approach Grey recommends towards the end of the video. He explains why a year is too long to cover with a single theme and that he recommends picking one per season. All of what he says there applies here as well with the added aspect that the more time a motto or goal is supposed to cover the higher the risk that circumstances change to the point where it becomes pointless.
Themes for 2021
Put together, I end up with this:
- I want to regularly publish content, but this goal is so encompassing that I’ll just take it as a given
- I want to use seasonal themes to focus on specific aspects, so I can get better at them
So this will be a year of themes (ha, looks like we found a motto, after all :D) and as a first, for this winter (roughly Q1 of 2021), I pick content planning. So far, I’ve tweeted, blogged, YouTubed, etc. pretty much whatever came to mind, but that’s not ideal. I think I can provide more value and thus grow my audience if I better gear my content towards each platform’s strength. I’m also considering building a kind of pipeline that prescribes when and where content gets published. The idea is still a bit murky — once I’ve figured it out, I’ll tell you about it in a newsletter later this quarter.
Possible themes for upcoming seasons could be video (better lighting and editing, maybe start scripting), streams (rethinking the layout, pimping OBS, putting more effort into planning streams), newsletter (defining a specific purpose and more clearly delineate it from other channels), and writing (getting better at storytelling) and know-how aside, I also have a few new content ideas for some of these channels. More details on that as the year runs its course.
Content
As to content, I’ll once again go for all the things, aiming for one thing per week. The channels are as before:
- blog posts
- newsletters
- videos on YouTube
- streams on Twitch
- news and the occasional thread on Twitter
- talks at conferences and meetups
- the few odd articles, podcasts, what-have-you here and there
With nipafx.dev up and running, I finally have the central hub on which to share all of this. Not all content appears there, yet, but, at this point, getting e.g. newsletters on there is just a matter of doing.
Story Overload
In case you’re wondering why this newsletter is so late, I had a very hard time ending my December break. It started on December 10th with Cyberpunk 2077, continued on through Christmas, new year’s, and… then two more weeks because why not?! (Long live self-employment!) I didn’t just sit on my ass, though. I’ve consumed a ton of stories in those five weeks and I terribly enjoyed how my mind blended them together in those twilight moments when you’re not fully awake but not sleeping either.
In case you’re interested, this is what I read and watched and I can recommend all of it (although to different degrees):
Books
- Warcross by Marie Lu (although you can tell that it’s a novel for teens)
- Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (he also wrote Recursion, which is even better)
- Madi: Once Upon A Time In The Future by Alex De-Campi and Duncan Jones (pretty cool cyberpunk comic collection)
- Virtual Light by William Gibson
TV Shows
- Archer (S11)
- Rick and Morty (S4)
- Alice in Borderland (S1)
- Blood of Zeus (S1)
- The Mandalorian (S1, S2)
- The Expanse (S3 — S5)
Movies
- Frozen 2 (family movie night)
- Rogue One
- The Old Guard
- Solo: A Star Wars Story
Channels
Games
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Tsioque (with my daughter)
- King’s Quest (likewise)
- Hades
Hm, maybe I did just sit on my ass after all… Either way, now I want an Epic Rap Battle between Heron (from Blood of Zeus) and Zagreus (from Hades).
I wish you a great year 2021!
