Winter of Learning Retrospective
Have you heard the good word about themes? If you haven't, take a look at this great video by CGP Grey on Themes and how they can work. For the last couple of years I've been doing yearly themes ... with limited success. This lack of success was entirely due to me not actually reviewing the status of my themes until the end of the year ... and by then it's too late!
This last December I decided that I'd do the themes, but this time I'd do seasonal set of themes instead of one BIG annual theme.
My current theme ended yesterday (March 18th) and this time I'm going to actually take stock of where I am and how 'well' I did.
Since my theme started on December 21, 2023 which is the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice, I decided to have a seasonal theme of 'Winter of Learning' with the following things I wanted to learn more about:
To help me keep track of this I dusted off my TIL github repo and started to write down some TILs. Over the course of the 88 days of my Seasonal theme I added 28 TILs. I also had 16 other, more personal, TILs that didn't make it into the repo for a total of 44 TILs. With 88 days that's a 50% hit rate on writing down stuff that I learned.
This is much better than I thought I had done. I'd been pretty down on myself because I had meant to write a TIL every night, but I didn't. I over estimated the number of times I didn't write a TIL and thought I had done much worse on it than I had.
Now, just because I wrote a TIL doesn't mean that it was one of the topics above that I had indicated I would WANT to write about, but that's OK! The point of a TIL is to document some stuff that you learned and the topics above were only ever meant to be guides, not directives.
I think the one thing I learned that I'm more proud of is spending a pretty good amount of time one weekend trying to learn Docker better. During one of Jeff Triplett's office hours I had joked that Docker scared me. And it was me actually saying it out loud that drove me to sit down and figure some shit out. I even had a public notes issue about it!
Overall this Winter of Learning isn't what I thought it would be, but I'm glad I did it. I am going to work to try and keep on writing TILs and hopefully I'll be able to get in at least 2 per week!
That being said, it's now time to prepare for my next seasonal theme ... the Spring of Transition. My daughter is a Senior in High School and is getting ready to head off to college. Now seems like a good time to start getting ready for my wife and I to be empty nesters and so we'll be spending the next 92 days figuring out how we can do that.
This post is part 1 of the "2024 Theme" series: