Happy and healthy new year! May it be better than the last one.

A year that started with Aaron Swartz’s death and ended with Nelson Mandela’s never had a chance of being a good one even without Snowden’s revelations and a never-ending supply of bleak news. Alas I promised last year to abstain from commenting on external events to keep annual review posts slashed-wrists risk free.

In some ways this year for me was a lot like the previous one. I worried about health of my family while continuing being lucky and otherwise happy. Today is two years since I started working at Aptivate and my enthusiasm hasn’t diminished one iota. So one thing I learned is that I am *not* an incorrigible curmudgeon that can’t stay put.

I learned a lot, especially from mentoring. It really is a blessing to have a wickedly smart and inquisitive mentee and I can’t recommend the experience enough.

I also learned to dive, which will not be a serious hobby but is a convenient skill to have. Visit to Socotra sadly won’t happen and neither will I dive in south France, but who knows what this year will bring.

What has worked and what not? Monthly reminders of my plans worked fine. I mostly ignored them (plans, not reminders), but at least I was doing this consciously and the frequency was right too so I’ll keep doing them this year. And it’s not like my plans changed only because of my fickleness. Mid-year killing of Google Reader unexpectedly made me busy with search for alternatives and writing exporter for my data in time. I didn’t have time to write a more suitable interface for querying and displaying said data and probably won’t this year either.

List of possible and unfinished projects is still liberating. With added dates of edits it also documents development of my priorities and I don’t mind that I don’t do most of it as long as I do some (which I did).

Digital sabbath also remains a good idea. I haven’t written the overview of books I read in 2013 yet, but I did compare dates on which I finished a book with my Github history and it is obvious that I can either read books or code in my free time, but not both unless I actually reserve time for it.

Another thing that proved itself is the importance of continuity of work. Small everyday steps have bigger effect than occasional sprints and they work better when I have a good to-do list which I didn’t always have.

I made an experiment this summer when I spent a day a week working on non-Aptivate project to learn and refresh my knowledge of Javascript tools and techniques and to see what to expect if I spent a day a week on personal projects. It didn’t work as well as I hoped. Day a week + a few hours on other days certainly moves things forward, but it is not a particularly satisfying experience for anyone involved and likely not sustainable either.

What I think would work better (for me) is to combine those off-days together into continuous chunks (say a week every 5 weeks or 2 every 10) for concentrated development of more complex parts of my projects and use those spare daily hours in-between for polishing and infrastructure. Painful side of this is that it reveals how little time I would actually have even if I had noticeably more of it. I am not sure yet what if anything to do with this.

This realisation also led to a painful acceptance of Sebastjan ’s observation that being too busy is simply a function of not pruning ambitions enough. So in 2014 I plan to read less. Who knows how many but I expect noticeably fewer than 20 books.

I will also not work on open data projects except maybe participating on hack days (if there will be any). To be honest I haven’t done much anyway, but I still wasted time and energy worrying about it.

Instead of building tools like mjp or image-diet I intend to be more egoistical and work on projects I talked about for years, but never came around developing.  Current projects will likely receive only bug fixes.

Any personal Python software project that will start in 2014 will be written in Python3. Clearly there is no better way to become proficient in it. Actually I expect to start only one project after I finish my current one.

I’ve been writing development journal since October and it is a bit early to say how it is going. I think it is providing insight to what I actually do, but at the same time I am still learning what to record and how. Will see what this year brings.

I’ll be 40 this year which should happen soon enough to not be a challenge and also provides a great motivation to fix my utter failure of this year of getting myself more fit.

My expectations are not evolved enough to be plans, but I imagine 2014 to be even more development intensive than 2013 was. It seems I won’t be attending many conferences, but I don’t expect to be bored. More than anything I hope it will be great year for my family and friends.

Autumn was busy and I did not finish any of the posts I started. I won’t do that now either, but at least I can try to soothe my guilty conscience by getting my rougher than usual thoughts out with hope of updating and polishing them later.

I expect it doesn’t take much effort to dig up words younger me wrote full of misplaced certainty and eagerness to set things right . No doubt I can still display both of these “virtues”, but I try not to and to limit the damage I use few psychological tricks such as postponing reply when possible, concentrating first on non-contentious parts when it isn’t and asking questions to help me understand how probable it is that I am wrong and what is driving my response. I’ve been compiling questions and this is what I have so far:

Do I want to believe in the result or position? Does it benefit or suit me?
You can always be wrong, but there’s better than usual chance of this when your beliefs coincide with your incentives whatever those are ^[1] .

How do I feel about a problem if I replace the group A in it with some other group B?
Do I feel or think differently about an issue if it involves a stranger instead of a friend or gays instead of women? If yes, then why? Are reasons substantial and substantiated or do they point to a prejudice?

Why am I trying to say this?
Not what I am trying to say! It’s easy to have an opinion, but I avoid voicing most of them by being sufficiently busy. So when I do want to speak up I try to understand the motives driving me since they are also the source of biases.

Is it a matter of a principle or degree?
I see this mistake most often when new technological developments are judged on assumptions that may (soon) not be true anymore, but the problem is general. When disagreeing with something I try to imagine conditions under which I wouldn’t and the likelihood of those conditions. Their likelihood not only tells me how fundamentally am I disagreeing with something, but also how likely I think it is, both of which can lead to new insight ^{[2] .}

Can I be persuaded?
I can’t be on every issue and am suspicious of those who can be. If I can come up with a realistic set of conditions that would change my view, then I have something to test it against. If I can’t, then stop since I am not having a dialog.

I don’t always run through all these questions, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who wishes I did. This unordered list is not exhaustive and I plan to add to it over time. Suggestions are also welcome.

1. Or as Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ↩
2. Example: unrealistic view of humanity makes communism and libertarianism equally absurd. ↩

Update 2: Tickets are now on sale and it is safe to say that I am not going. The opening price (which will go up after 50 sold tickets) is already too high for me and it is exactly what I was originally afraid of.

Update : I am sorry, I overreacted. As http://2014.djangocon.eu//news/ makes clear tickets will cover everything except getting there and I have full confidence they will be reasonably priced. Listed transport options for those from my neighborhood are still valid (unless somebody has better data which would be great).

I did not go to DjangoCon Europe in Warsaw this year, but I was certain I would go to the next one. Not anymore.

There is no good way of contacting organizers ^[1] and not much travel information either on the DjangoCon’s website or elsewhere. Most of what there is is in French which I don’t speak so my worries are hopefully unfounded, but what I found so far looks grim.

First transport. It is not organizer’s fault I live where I do (Ljubljana, Slovenia), but my options are plane (500+€; travel time 6 and 17 hours), train (EUR ??; travel time 14-24h in each direction) or car which would take about 9 hours in one direction and cost around 600€ total per car (180 for tolls, ~400 for fuel with hopefully free parking there).

It is really difficult to get a good idea of how much do hotels on the island cost, but judging by tripadvisor they are not cheap and in general cost 100+€ per day. Staying on the mainland can be done cheap er , but I think ferry costs at least 13€ per day so total cost will likely not be very low and you will not be around for any late events.

No idea yet about how easy it is to find suitable food if you are a vegetarian or a vegan or how much does it cost. I assume it can be worked out.

In total this looks significantly more than it did to attend EuroPython in Florence and that was FLORENCE!

I dislike criticizing efforts of others, especially when I know that involves a lot of volunteering and when I am not privy to inside knowledge and dilemmas. However as a regular conference goer it does look to me that there has been a shift happening from egalitarian accessibility of making community conferences cheap and easy enough for anyone to attend to a more stratified approach where money (or time) poor will have to do with video recordings/broadcasts while the rest will get ever flashier experience.

There is obviously a lot of value in meeting face to face (otherwise most of us would probably prefer to save the expense of it) which is why I would find this kind of development sad if it happened to major community gatherings like DjangoCon Europe. So I am hoping that it isn’t and it won’t.

1. I know there’s a Twitter account. I don’t find it a good channel for the kind of communication I want, but that is a different discussion. ↩