Back to homepage

Moving to 2024

Here is the traditional end-of-the-year and New Year’s expectations post.

This will be the third time I wrote consecutively, you can see other posts also on Medium.

Personal 2021 Summary and 2022 Expectations

Looking back to 2022 and hoping for a better 2023

Looking back to 2023

2023 was a tough year, I believe COVID lockdowns were taking their toll. On one hand, I had some health issues mostly caused by a sedentary lifestyle and working with computers. On the other hand, Google announced layoffs during my probation period and it created a lot of stress for me. In the end, I was not one of the affected employees, but until the air cleared off I was quite stressed.

How much have I completed my targets?

Health

• My average step count is 5800 and my daily target is 8000. I think that is more than hitting the target at least 4 days a week. PASS
• Most weeks I did 2 exercises per week. So I missed this target. FAIL
• My current BMI is 25.9 so it’s above the target range, FAIL

When it comes to reading, I did better than in 2022 but have not hit my target yet. My target was 24 but I finished 15 books which is nice. FAIL

Financial

• I did the monthly contributions quite regularly, if I miss a month the next month I compensate for that. PASS
• Emergency funds are fluctuating but can be considered okay. PASS
• My only side hustle was blogging here. And I was able to collect $102 and my target was $100. PASS

Creator

• I wrote, including this one, 18 articles on Medium. PASS
• I did not count how many posts I sent out on X but for sure I was more active, especially after removing Instagram and LinkedIn applications from my phone, X is the only social network application on my phone. PASS
• I was definitely not active on YouTube as a creator. FAIL

So if I only consider PASS / FAIL counts I was able to hit 60% of my targets. And I would consider this as a successful year.

Here comes 2024

This year I will focus on fitness more than in 2022 and 2023. So my priority targets will be around that.

• I will have at least 4 active days in a week. An active day means at least 20 minutes of exercise.
• At least once a week, I will walk or run at least 5 km.
• I will try to follow a Mediterranean diet. So more salads and vegetables, more fish, less red meat.
• I will reduce my alcohol intake from around once a week to once a month.

I also have some technical goals

• Getting the Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification
• Getting more experience with Apache Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow
• Getting more experience with streaming data

When it comes to creator goals, this year they are also tech related

• I want to create two Android apps
• I will build these in public and share the development on build.canburaktumer.com
• I will align with Scott Hanselman’s advice and move a copy of my blog posts to archive.canburaktumer.com

This year I do not have any financial goals. I will try to save and invest, but there are other priorities at the moment.

Conclusion

Although 2023 was not easy, it was a successful year in my opinion. I have high hopes for 2024, let’s see what it will bring.