Goals: December 2024
December 18, 2024 — 2 minute read — goals
This month I’ve set a few goals for myself, and I’d like to report my progress:
Goal 1: Do the Advent of Code challenge
I’ve attempted it several times in the past, and never made it past day 6. I decided to teach myself some Go this year and I’m happy to report I’ve now successfully completed through day 12—except for the second half of day 9. I think my solution for part 1 was a little too messy to adapt for part 2, and I got burnt out after a couple hours of trying to get it working. I’ll try to go back if I have time in the future.
Learning Go has been pretty fun, although I’m well aware that doing these challenges isn’t showing me anything close to real-world Go usage. AoC hasn’t given me a problem where I need to use goroutines or more than one struct method. I haven’t used interfaces or generics. I still don’t know what “struct embedding” is. I’ve avoided learning Go for a while for some reason, but I think I like the language. It feels a bit like writing C (which I like) with less frustration to do simple tasks.
Goal 2: Avoid social media/entertainment websites
I’m constantly annoyed with myself for wasting time scrolling through websites like these:
- Hacker News
- Lobste.rs
- YouTube
I did pretty well the first 9 days or so, although I did find that it didn’t “solve” focus for me. It improved things, but the internet is a large place and it’s really easy to find myself going down a rabbit hole from an innocent place. I’ve especially noticed it improve things when I’m not working or doing advent of code or whatever. I use my limited free time a lot more wisely when I don’t pull my phone out on the toilet, or open Reddit “just for a minute”.
It all fell apart after a week and a half but today I’m trying to recommit.