What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year? I'd be interested on hearing a range of different plans; creative, personal, business, technical and so on.
At 40, after having a kid with my wife a couple years ago, I've just started getting serious about learning to program, after a lifetime of lazily dabbling in various i.t. things. Am now enrolled in uni to finish my bach in CS, which is also where I work.
Have also began to learn about investing in 2020 and have had a lot of fun doing that. Highly recommend the Investing for Beginners podcast with Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern if you don't know anything (like me).
Not afraid to say I've been contributing time to a nonprofit arts organization in my area, and have gotten on its board of directors. I run their web site and we're doing a frontend overhaul/server swap/Cloudflare DNS setup this month. Admittedly a bit scared because I've done this on my own setups but not on a site that gets traffic. Onward to 2021!
/r/wallstreetbets was a fantastic place to really get into the higher forms of investment until it garnered attention from the mainstream... now its full of idiotic "autist" and "retard" jokes.
There was surprisingly high-level technical analysis going on there at one point.
In 2020, after 30 years in IT / simulation, I started as a volunteer in a raptor conservancy. It’s an outdoor job: in rain or shine, hot or cold, the birds still need their aviaries cleaning, and the weeds in the grounds don’t stop growing. The experts on the bird team are perhaps 30 years younger than me, and I will never be as good as they are at handling prima-donna falcons and flying-psychopath eagles. This has been a superb exercise in learning humility and the need to earn respect based on getting menial jobs done rather than one’s past glories.
The pay off is the privilege of being able to help with the flying displays, and having these stunning birds fly to you over the heads of the excited audience when you correctly give the "I've got food" signal they've been trained to recognise.
> What are people from the community here going to start to learn for the first time this year
Continuing learning how to handle these magnificent animals and to work with them to create impressive experience for the visitors.
Piano. I am 48, but I love learning new things. Playing instrument is something what I wanted to do for a looong time. Bought myself an electric guitar last year, and I do practice a bit, but have nothing to show for it now. It appears to be going a bit easier with a piano (I still do practice guitar). Not willing to stick to self-learning only I've already made an arrangement with a piano teacher, will have my lessons when the quarantine is lifted. For now SimplePiano and Flowkey will do.
Last year was when I got hooked on astrophotography, going very well so far (I have good skills at photography and image processing so it was way easier). Brought some satisfaction for not finishing my astrophysics PhD program.
I've been trying to work on my outdoor skills... I already rock climb and ski a little bit. I am hoping to learn to lead easy ice climbs and get into the backcountry to ski this winter, including some overnight trips. We got out today, booted up a snowy canyon... only to find no ice. Oh well, that is the process: we just keep going out and doing progressively more difficult goals, and try not to get killed in a slide or a fall.
Also, my company has hired someone to work directly under me, so I hope to learn to be a competent manager, which I've never done in a formal situation. I've been reading a lot and reflecting on my own experiences, and have been documenting our processes. I will have a plan to onboard the new person soon.
Finally, if the covid situation eases up later in the year, I hope to return to performing music. I've been in a lot of bands and performed solo, or even one-off gigs with other musicians, but I hope to be able to build a band that a) I am fronting for > 80% of the material and b) brings in some income beyond what it takes to operate. That part of the business has its own set of learning curves, at least as far as I can tell from my years as a semi-professional side guy. The plan there is to start as a solo performer and gradually add other musicians, using low-rent bar gigs as rehearsals, but I am not sure how that will work out.
It may be a meme, but using Gentoo for the first time. I did Linux From Scratch in a VM and it piqued my curiosity. Although I would prefer Nix or Guix due to their interesting declarative approach, I decided to go for Gentoo so I can have a better understanding of how to tweak the heck out of a real system.
Also, probably getting more up-to-date on C++. I have let my skills slack, and some of the new things in C++20 seem intriguing. The only issue here is finding a good project to work on. Doing interview-style problems is basically "how to use the standard library proficiently in the scope of one file, and probably just ~5 methods", and other things seem difficult to approach. This seems very different from the clear progression one finds in other popular languages.
(If anyone has any suggestions for such projects, please do share. I could use some help)
C++ has been my main programming language for the last 20+ years. (Dang this makes me feel old.)
For my paid work (at multiple jobs), I've never been allowed to use C++ newer than C++11. At first it was due to incomplete compiler support, and later on it was because various customers were using older versions of RHEL whose standard version of GCC was something like 4.8.
I know I plan to pick up sewing this year. It isn't something I've ever given any thought, but I've fallen down a rabbit hole in the last few weeks and am excited to start mending my own clothes and creating new outfits.
One of my favorite things in life is to get into a rabbit hole of a new hobby. This usually comes with lots of energy from the excitement and learning something new.
I also love listening to friends and others talk about whatever hobby they are deep into. It's fascinating how almost anything can become someone's main hobby and passion.
Downsizing our current company has given me some more free time (which is bittersweet, as it seems to signal the beginning of the end for us, but liberating at the same time) to pursue some non-career oriented goals. I’m learning statistics and probability. I’ve found that learning an academic subject, without the academic pressure, is a very productive way to learn for me. Doing the exercises feel more like a rigor of learning rather than for a grade, which is a refreshing and unfamiliar feeling for me.
I am planning to learn how to write better. I am starting that by maintaining a stream of consciousness personal daily log. Also get more practice by commenting on Hacker News :)
I'm going to continue learning Japanese. Focusing more on reading instead of just flash cards.
I've also set a five-year goal to get a creative work published. The first two years will be dedicated to reading more good works and writing more (likely terrible) things. Not planning beyond the first two, because that'll likely change when I understand more about how one goes about getting published.
Even if I give up after a year, I'll have enjoyed the prep work.
I already picked some stuff up in 2020, so I'll probably continue with that.
I started painting miniatures - it's something I've always wanted to do but never really did. I also bought some cheap ones so my kids can paint along.
Working on my text MUD. Which involves learning more about Elixir. And spending more leisure time reading books - I don't have that much exposure, and want to get some worldbuilding inspiration.
I'm planning on learning Unreal Engine this year. I had purchased some courses on Udemy including the Unreal Engine C++ Developer course. I've been wanting to pick this up for a while so my personal OKR is to finish this course in the next 3 months.
That's nuts, I literally just downloaded UE yesterday and subscribed to Quixel to compliment my learning. I'd be very interested in knowing which courses you selected.
I'm mostly planning on spending my time honing in on the skills that I started learning in 2020.
That is music production and art. I've been doing music production on and off, but this year i plan to really hone in and try to improve . I also got an art tablet after half a year of doing pixel animation, and digital art is really rewarding! It helps that I already have the basics of art down.
As a grown man (with grown children!) I find it incredibly humbling to learn to read all over again. I am learning Hiragana as a necessary step to learning Japanese.
I’ve got a few plans that involved substantial learning. I try to get a head start on New Years, this time specifically because I moved cities and that’s a great opportunity to build new habits.
1. I’m forcing myself to push through with Linux on the desktop and managing a more robust network. This will help with 2. It’s going pretty well so far. The big insight has been to work around some of the harder parts rather than punish myself; e.g. I just don’t use the intel graphics and the nvidia graphics simultaneously. I bought a DisplayPort cable so I can use two monitors with my one nvidia card. Next up, I want to get a setup where I can run my self-hosted services reliably across several devices. I may do a kubernetes type setup across several raspberry pi servers and possibly a new dedicated x86 box. I’ve never used kubernetes so figuring out if that’s crazy will be part of the learning process.
2. I’ve always a wanted to take on a real-life 3D mapping project. I’ve got a 360 camera on the way, which I’ll be using at first with mapillary, then self-hosting with openstreetcam. The pieces are all there to build 3D models from that content, so that will be my opportunity to really learn how that stuff works and make it happen. I love the city at night so I’d like to build a full nighttime map if possible; it looks totally different than during the day, but there’s enough artificial light I think it should be possible, if not practical.
3. I’ve outfitted my kitchen and am committing myself to cooking all but one or two meals a week, and to try to do that well. I suck really bad, but I’m starting to build an intuition for how basic bread works, I’ve had some mild success with quick breads and am also starting to have intuition for corn bread specifically. I made butter chicken on Monday for the first time, from a recipe that suspiciously used no butter. It came out great but not quite like I’m used to at restaurants; I look forward to trying again. I’d love to get into sweets and pastries like croissants. Biggest lesson learned so far: hand-rolled butter is worth every last penny, despite being twice as expensive than the usual butter. It has a depth and complexity of flavor more like cheddar than the mass-produced stuff.
4. I’m learning piano and music theory through that. It is a lot of fun, but certainly not easy. This is the first time in a while I’ve get viscerally what it’s like to be a child learning to walk - getting my hands to do the right thing at the right time is very difficult, especially with two-handed playing. I’ve also been amazed at how quickly ability builds with regular practice. I still suck really bad, but I’m getting what I wanted out of it, including a deeper appreciation of the music I listen to, the ability to read very simple sheet music, and honestly just a humbling challenge. I highly recommend it if you haven’t learned music already; it so so different from my usual skills that it really is like building from scratch. The process is physically exhausting because of the amount of effort it takes to operate my hands and not press the wrong keys. I feel like I can feel how much my brain is changing to build those new pathways.
