January has already slipped out of our hands, as have most of our New Year’s resolutions and habit goals. The momentum and excitement around our ambitious goals that were flooding our timelines not long ago have vanished. Maybe you were part of this annual movement and had your own collection of dreams to reach this year; and just maybe you’re on course; or perhaps you’re already a month into stopping trying. While I’ve never been much for New Year’s Resolutions, I’m no stranger to setting goals and not quite reaching them. But I’m hoping for something different this year.
✔ Last Year’s Goals
Last year, during February and March I set out to build better habits in my life: eating well, exercising, reading, waking up early, etc. I decided not to focus on big goals, but instead to focus on being consistent with what I call the doing of the habit. In this process of this, I kept hearing about this book called Atomic Habits from a bunch of productivity Youtubers. Curious enough, I picked it up. I ended up reading it twice last year and applied one of the book’s main ideas to my habit building. James Clear, the author, suggests building systems, rather than setting goals, which is the path I had started down already. And although I did have several failures, I consider this as one of the best years for accomplishing personal goals.
Some of those goals, like having a more regular sleep schedule and eating better went exceptionally well. Exercising regular went very well for the summer months, but once November rolled around and it got cold, this fell off the rails and I have yet to pick it backup. And although I did read a lot more than I have in years past, I often would miss several consecutive weeks before picking a book back up. In the Spring I also picked up recording cover songs and uploading them to my YouTube channel. I stuck with this pretty consistent up until October, where my time became a bit more limited. During this time I changed jobs, and made an intentional decision to take a break.
👀 Looking At This Year
So overall it was a really successful year, but it still had its failures. This year, I am hoping to set some more specific goals and stick to them. I would like to be a year where I can explore some more creative avenues – music & writing in particular; this blog is part of that goal. I’ve considered focusing on just One Thing, but in my current situation, it makes sense to break it out into a few habits. To help me build these habits, I will continue to focus on systems. But I will also tie these systems to some “recurring goals.” I hope these goals will provide me some excitement to keep working towards building these systems. The three areas I’m hoping to build habits in are Writing, Finances, and Music. Let’s break down how I hope to accomplish this.
✍ Writing
Habit: Write daily through blogging and Object Writing
Recurring Goals: Publish at least a monthly blog post on here or Taco Tandem
I’ve never considered myself to be a good writer. Back in school and university, I had to build myself up to writing because I had so much dread. Funny enough, even though I hated it so much, once I would start writing, I could often find myself writing far longer papers than required. I would reach a flow state and the words came easily to me. Outside of this, I’ve always enjoyed writing songs, but have often found myself to go through phases. I can write a lot of songs one month, but then go through a 6-month drought where I can’t write a single lyric.
The motivation behind this goal is to break that drought. I love songwriting and would really like to make it something I can do more regularly (more on this later). Additionally, I would really like to start sharing some of my life and the things I learn online. I think that blogging is the best application for this, which is why you’re reading this today. Since I started my other blog, Taco Tandem, I find that I can enjoy writing a lot, given the right context. And although I haven’t written much for this blog yet, I’ve really enjoyed the posts I have made.
The Writing Habit
The habit I would like to build is daily writing. I believe will improve my ability to express my thoughts and stories. I also believe that the more regularly I can do this, the more I will enjoy the hobby. A few years back I read the book Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Patterson. It’s an incredible book that provides a great tool call Object Writing. Object writing is a writing exercise where you’re given a random word and you write for 10 minutes straight, stopping immediately when the timer rings. During this time, you are allowed to take your writing any direction, but are encouraged to tap into the seven senses: sound, smell, touch, taste, sight, kinetic, and internal/organic. I will use this exercise combined with writing for this blog to help me build this habit.
💰 Investing
Habit: Watch + Understand Stock Markets and Invest Regularly
Goal: Invest a large portion of income in 401k, Roth IRA, or index funds
Money is a weird topic for me. Though I don’t remember being taught this, the subject always has seemed a bit taboo to discuss. However, over this past year I’ve been working to educate myself better on saving and investing. I’ve never been one for budgeting or making a financial plan, but I have always leaned towards being conservative with spending while saving as much as possible.
At the job I started in 2020, they offered a 401(k) match up to 5%, so I decided to take full advantage of it, since it is basically free money for saving that. Since that time I have been keeping up with a 401(k) as well as investing in a Roth IRA. I made these choices somewhat blindly, but afterwards starting to research more about investing. This was the first time I took the time to watch markets and learn about movement. It has been a weird time to get involved in investing, given the chaotic behavior of the market since the start of the pandemic.
The Investing Habit
This year, I would like to build a better habit of watching the markets and studying their behavior better. My goal isn’t necessarily to try to time anything to buy stocks, but just to build more intuition about the market’s behavior. I also want to build a habit of investing regularly. I’m fairly new to investing, so I believe index funds are the safest way to put money in and leave it for the future. My 401(k) and Roth IRA contributions come out at every paycheck, but I am manually investing every quarter. I believe this will let me get involved in the market, but also try to take advantage of small dips in a fund, on any given week. This might be foolish to try to time it, but for the most part, I’m planning on putting the same amount in 4 times this year.
The goal is pretty vague here, but I would like to invest a very large portion of what I make into savings. Right now, I’m set to invest around 20% and am undecided about how to save the remaining amount. As I learn more, I’ll be sharing my plans here on this blog, so stay tuned. 😉
🎙 Music
Habit: Build a daily habit of object writing and practice new music weekly
Goal 1: Publish original songs on Spotify/Amazon Music
Goal 2: Continue uploading cover songs on my YouTube channel
As I mentioned before, last year I started regularly uploading cover songs to my YouTube channel. I have found the process of arranging music and recording songs to be extremely rewarding. While making each song, I usually run into a few new issues that inspire new ideas. I enjoy the process of making music as well as the videography required to put together the songs. Each song required several camera angles, so I can get lost in the edit for quite a while.
I would like to rebuild the habit of uploading cover songs to that channel. Although I don’t expect that I’ll be able to release songs weekly, as my channel banner promises, it’s something I want to carve out time to accomplish. I would also like to record my own music to publish to streaming platforms like Spotify & Amazon Music.
The Music Habit
The hard thing about these habits is that it seems impossible for me to put a time on how long it takes to finish a song. Sometimes I can knock out the instrumentation in a few short hours, whereas other times it takes a few evenings. Then recording and editing the video can also vary greatly in timing. This makes it hard to set any specific goals, so I’m focusing on just making it regular. As a rough idea, I would like to put out about an album’s length of original songs over the course of the year (though I will release them all as singles). So hopefully 9-12 songs will be out on streaming services along with a collection of new covers on YouTube.
🍀 Wish Me Luck
So, that’s the plan! It’s hard to judge at this point what I’m going to be able to accomplish, but I’m hoping that by writing it down and publishing it, it’ll give me a kick to keep going on all of these. If you have any strategies, book recommendations, or encouragement, I’d love to hear it in the comments below! Wish me luck! 🤞
👋 Welcome
Hi, I’m Joel! Thanks for coming to my blog. This is the first post of (hopefully?) many. I’m hoping to create a blog to share my thoughts on software engineering, technology, and life. Introductions are a little awkward, since I’m not sure that there is a specific thing to share, other than who I am. So, rather than give a biography on myself, I thought I would just give you a rundown of how I got interested in computers and how that has lead us both to this blog post today. Sound good? Ok, cool 🙂
👥 My Background
So, like I said, I’m Joel! I’m a software engineer and a musician, but you’re probably here for the former. Please allow me to share a little bit about my experience as a programmer and what brought me to the me you’re reading about today.
About fifteen years ago, I picked up one of my dad’s programming books. I was only 8 at the time, but the book, though only on HTML, sparked an interest in me. From my perspective, I had the power to create anything digitally. I loved the struggle of trying to get layouts to work right and falling into HTML `<table>` tags to get it (this is before flexbox and grid graced this earth). After finding some comfort building static pages with HTML and CSS, I quickly wanted to learn how websites made dynamic content and let users interact with the site — I wanted it to do things.
After a year or so messing around with Visual Basic 6, I was introduced to PHP & MySQL, which landed me on learning to develop websites in a LAMP stack. For the next several years I would create project after project for fun. I created a web-based game where you could create your characters and have them duel, but also had to care for your fighter’s needs. It was basically a mix of Sword & Sandals: Gladiator with Neopets. I took an interest in creating mods for Minecraft and created a website that could generate Minecraft mods for ModLoader and Forge (back in the day). That website was the first thing I created that actually had any success. For half a year, I averaged about 10,000 active users a day. If I was smarter, I would’ve monetized that better.
Contracting & Education
When I was 15 I started to get my first contracting work, mostly subcontracting through a friend who had a successful web development business. While a lot of the work was building static websites for small businesses, there were some interesting projects along the way. One of my favorite projects was creating a Officer management system for the state’s Parent Teacher Association. During this time I started using JavaScript regularly and had my first exposure to front-end frameworks. I continued doing freelancing work until I graduated college and began searching for a full-time position.
After graduating with dual BS in Electrical & Computer Engineering, I took a job at a local company, MidwayUSA, as a Web Applications Developer. This was my first exposure to the “Microsoft web,” where we used .NET Framework, WCF, C#, and the likes. Though I didn’t care a whole lot for the stack, I learned a lot here about front-end development and was introduced to my current favorite language, Elm. Because we were an E-Commerce company, I had the opportunity to work with account life cycles, billing & payment processing, product management, checkout, and much more. We integrated about thirty different services provided by other development teams at the company. I spent most of my time at the company refactoring legacy C# and AngularJS 1.0 code into modern Web APIs and front-end apps in React or Elm.
Elixir / Erlang
During my last few months at Midway I had the opportunity to explore a new-to-me technology, Elixir. I worked with another developer to build an application that would collect and format all of our product data before sending it to our search provider. I really fell in love with the language during this time and read the books Programming Elixir 1.6 and Craft GraphQL APIs with Elixir and Absinthe. These books — especially the Absinthe one — excited me about the technology. So when it came time for me to look for another company, finding a team using Elixir was one of my top priorities.
🧪 Programming Today
At the start of December of 2021, I took a new position as a Software Engineer at InfluxData/InfluxDB. If you’ve worked with time-series data before, you might have heard of them. InfluxData’s main product is their time-series database InfluxDB. Since joining the team, I have had a huge amount of opportunity to learn and grow. With that time and a lot of help from the team, I have made a lot progress learning Elixir in the past month and a half than I did since I started learning in March 2021.
I’m extremely grateful to get to be part of the team I’m on. They are a solid group of individuals and are all talented. I just started my time there, but I’m looking forward to everything in store for me at InfluxData.
💭 So, why this blog?
I really enjoy getting to express my thoughts and feelings creatively. Playing and creating music has been one of my favorites hobbies for the past decade. I’ve really never considered myself as much of a writer (or speaker), but it’s a skill that I would like to develop in the coming years. My intention is to create this blog alongside of a YouTube channel where I can share what I am learning in my career and hobbies. Primarily, I will create posts of programming and technology, but I would also be interested in sharing the thoughts I takeaway from books I read as well and productivity ideas.
I don’t have a grand plan for every step along the way, but writing and sharing is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and there really isn’t a better time to start than 5 years ago. Now, since I’ve already missed that deadline, I’ll go for today! Get signed up for my newsletter so you’re not missing out on any posts!
I can’t wait to learn and share!
Joel Abshier
def blog_post(first_post) do
case first_post do
%BlogPost{contains_any_code?: false} -> apologize()
_blog_post -> do_nothing()
end
end
😭 Forgive me! Code will come soon! 🙏