We are just over an hour into 2019 where I am (Singapore), though it is still 2018 in the UK. For me, the highlight of the year was probably receiving the VCLA Outstanding Masters’ Thesis award in August; the worst part of the year would probably be around April, when I had a month or so of doing primarily reactive tasks and managing technical debt. Nonetheless, every year will have positive experiences (hopefully) and negative ones as well; I’d say my main takeaway from 2018 is that optimisation can be dangerous if one picks the wrong variables.
I set some targets at the beginning of the year. While setting targets without subsequently revisiting them can already spur improvement, it’s useful to consider how one has performed as it informs drafting next year’s goals (in particular, figuring out what is realistic, and what would be too comfortable). The grading system I’m using here is similar to the OKR system – each task receives a score between 0.0 and 1.0, and a straight success (with no extensions or bonuses) scores 0.7. For quantifiable tasks, I usually do a pretty straightforward linear interpolation with zero at 0.0, and 10/7 of the target at 1.0; usually a 1.0 means that the goal either wasn’t ambitious enough, or the relevant area became more important during the year.
Contents
A1: Software Engineering: 0.5
Not quantitative. Progress this year, while significant, felt largely incremental (which is maybe unsurprising as I’ve been focusing on similar work in terms of distributed systems and back-end performance).
I’d say most of the “progress” here is in the form of a considerably more principled approach to pursuing performance improvements and building new features. It’s difficult to evaluate improvement in Java skills; I spent some time this year studying Java performance (especially garbage collection algorithms and concurrency). There were a few bugs I remember this year where Java Memory Model knowledge was useful, which I wouldn’t have known as well this time last year.
A2: Logic in Computer Science: 0.9
The original goal here was arguably quantitative, in that it was to present one paper at a logic conference. This was presented – see this AAMAS18 page. I decided to bump the score up from 0.7 to 0.9 as a somewhat related highlight of the year was receiving the VCLA Outstanding Masters’ Thesis award for my work on MCMAS-Dynamic. This was mostly based on past work, though I had to write up a summary of the work that had been done.
This target was intentionally not too ambitious. I do want to finish up one more paper from the thesis – I think four is about the limit of where we can take this (the third paper already had a decent amount of original content) but I don’t anticipate presenting that until possibly 2020.
A3: Innovation in Engineering: 0.7
The goal here was to get two patents in the pipeline, and this was achieved exactly. There might be a third coming from my winter hack-week project, but I prefer not to count things that aren’t done yet.
This goal was conceived as an alternative to the pull-requests goal I had in 2016, as I find a small number of substantive changes to usually be far more motivating than many smaller incremental changes. (A possible danger of this is that I might discount the value of said incremental changes too much!) I’ll probably keep some version of this in 2019, as I find this kind of innovation enjoyable and motivating.
B1: Writing and Blogging: 0.4
The goal was 52 and I think this puts me on 27; I’ll be generous and round up. It seems a weekly schedule is pretty challenging, particularly around holidays and busy periods at work. I do still want to maintain somewhat regular updates here, but a lower target (40, perhaps, to allow for some of these) could be more reasonable.
B2: Travelling: 0.3
The goal was to visit 12 countries, considering the UK as my home base. I’m writing this from Singapore, and have also visited Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the US, so this puts me on 6. That would be 0.35 – this rounds to 0.4 by standard conventions, but I’ll round down considering how work-dependent most of these trips were. I do enjoy visiting new places and learning more about them; however spending time with friends and family is also important to me, and in some ways travel allows me to do that. I think some kind of travel-related goal is likely to feature next year, though I’m not sure yet what form that should take.
B3: Walking: 0.7
The goal was to walk an average of 10,000 steps per day. I’m at 10,131 and I can add one more to that average for every 365 steps I walk today. Bumping this to 0.8 would require 213,160 steps today, so I’m fairly confident 0.7 is right.
I commute to and from work by walking most of the time. This provides a form of exercise and also saves money on transport (tube fares in London are expensive). That accounts for around 7-8,000 steps; the rest are accumulated walking around the office, or on weekends exploring. I don’t think this was sufficient in terms of physical fitness.
B4: Music: 0.5
There is some progress; I’m able to hit Bb4 quite a bit more consistently than I used to, but B4 remains difficult and elusive. I came across Meant to Be this year and attempted to sing it – I can just about manage the song (including the female vocal line) which requires consistent Bb4; trying it at a +1 key has not worked. I would not have been able to land consistent A4s even at this time last year, so the improvement could be considered as two semitones out of three.
C1: Gross Savings Rate: 0.8
The goal was a gross savings rate (Savings Rate #1 in this post from Early Retirement Now) of 50 percent, and this ended up at 54.2 percent for this year. I think this is good given that UK taxes can be quite high. This is a difficult chord to play, as one needs to determine how to discount future utility from money put into savings and investments. I think this was slightly higher than expectations.
C2: Minimum Income Standard: 0.8
The goal was to have non-housing expenditures of at least £10,800 for the year; this reached £12,000. This may seem somewhat antithetical to C1, though the issue with savings rate is that higher isn’t necessarily better; I’d prefer a sufficient budget at SR 50% over a tight one at SR 65%. It’s also not impossible to score highly on both goals (by earning more).
D1: Communications and Maintenance: 0.6
This goal is non-quantitative. I think I’ve made reasonable efforts to keep in touch with friends from both Imperial and Singapore. For the most part this has gone well, though there have been some lapses where I haven’t been as responsive as I’d have liked, hence just under the target sounds about right.
