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Greetings from 2024! As this is my fourth post on the topic of annual resolutions I think I can now consider it to be a habit. This is where I look back at the resolutions I made a year ago and assess how I did in the cold light of day; and then on the back of what is usually a mixed set of results I go on to pretend there's some value in me doing the same thing again for the year ahead.

But to be clear, these plans aren't supposed to be life-goals, sweeping changes or major reevaluations of the self. Rather they're supposed to be incremental improvements; achievable tasks that help me focus on specific changes I can make during the year that would be easy to overlook otherwise.
 

Before getting into the resolutions themselves I think it's worth reflecting on the kind of year 2023 was for me. The world seemingly had a torrid year and while it's impossible not to acknowledge how traumatic world events have been, I hope you'll forgive me for focusing on only my own small corner of the year in this post.

It was a positive — albeit turmultuous — year for me. Most of the turmoil happened in February when I moved countries, from living in Finland to living in the UK; and changed jobs from working at Jolla Oy to working at The Alan Turing Institute. Although I loved living in Finland and working for Jolla, I still consider these changes to be positive ones, mostly because it means I'm now back living in the same home as my wife Joanna. It's hard to overstate the improvement in quality of life that this brings to me.

February was also the month of FOSDEM'23 which I enjoyed hugely. I'm hoping to have a similarly enjoyable trip to Belgium this coming February for FOSDEM'24. Related to this is the fact that Jolla Oy, which has had its own tumultuous year, now looks to be in a better place. I still use Sailfish OS as my main phone operating system, so I'm encouraged that it's now on a more stable footing.

Although most of these changes were anticipated when I wrote my 2023 resolutions, the real ramifications of them were always going to be unclear beforehand. So my resolutions have to be considered in this context.

So, looking back at my resolutions for 2023, here's what they looked like:

1. Learn quantum programming.
2. Make the most of London with Joanna.
3. Take the bisection work to the next stage.

And how did I do? The headline figure is one out of three, which is less than fifty percent and therefore not the success I was hoping for. But that doesn't mean it was a futile exercise. Let's look in more detail.

First the plan to learn quantum computing. Although I did make some progress on this by reading through "Programming Quantum Computers" by Eric R. Johnston, Nic Harrigan and Mercedes Gimeno-Segovia, I can't really consider it to be a success because I didn't finish the book. That would have been the minimum criterion. Despite this, it was still a worthwhile goal and having it in my list did give me more focus than I would have otherwise.

In practice my move to The Alan Turing Institute brought with it a huge amount of new things to learn and new opportunities for learning them. The institute has a much stronger commitment to continuous learning than other organisations I've worked for — an incredibly positive thing — and consequently I was able to join a Transformers reading group, a Rust reading group and a Linear Algebra reading group. Plus I had to learn the ropes of the job. Amidst all this other learning, my quantum computing plans took a back seat. Maybe I'll make more headway in 2024.

Second was to make the most of London with Joanna. This, I think, was a success. We went to see Hamilton, Matilda, the "Titanosaur" Patagotitan at the British Natural History Museum and a lecture about generative AI at the Royal Institute. We also enjoyed some nice meals out and I met up with friends in London on multiple occasions. So I feel like this was a success and one I should try to maintain in the coming year.

Finally I completely failed to take the bisection work forwards. This was overtaken by my commitment to upgrade Gecko to ESR 91 and publish a daily blog covering my progress. If I'm honest, although I'd love to have wrapped up the bisection work, there was no chance of me doing both and I'm happy with the choice I made. I still hope to get the bisection work published at some point, but not until this ESR 91 work is complete.
 

So what does 2024 have to offer? I don't want lots of new years resolutions, but I decided I do want there to be exactly one resolution from each of four topics that I care deeply about. As such I've split my resolutions into four categories: maths, computing, ecology and fun. I've picked the things that I most want to achieve for each of these in 2024. Here they are:

1. Start working through "Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction" by James V. Stone.
2. Do something practical in Rust.
3. Make twelve incremental ecological improvements to my life.
4. Go to at least three events or exhibitions at the British Library.

A little context about these. The first was suggested by Rahul and both Alun and I agreed this would be a great thing to do. I've paused on this until after the ESR 91 work is complete, but if I don't get that completed this year I have bigger problems. I've always wanted to understand Information Theory more and this book seems to include many of the really interesting results I want to better understand: Shannon's Source Coding Theorem and Kolmogorov Complexity for example. It doesn't cover Hamming Distance, so that might require delving into a different text.

As I mentioned I've joined a Rust reading group. That's fun and useful but I need to do something practical to cement the knowledge I've been accumulating. I already started doing some development on top of the existing (but incomplete) rust_gpiozero codebase so my intention is to continue with this work. But if I switch to some other piece of practical Rust programming that's fine too.

My third resolution is to make a series of incremental improvements to my life in terms of reducing my environmental impact. I really wanted to make one of my resolutions ecological, but this was by far the hardest to decide upon. In previous years I've recorded my waste output, we had a heat pump installed and each year I offset my annual carbon emissions. But in order to achieve continual improvement I needed something different this year. I have a list of things I'd like to do: look into getting solar panels installed, commute by bike rather than by bus, switch my bank and pension to use green investment funds, avoid having to get in a plane. If I can make one such improvement per month, then I think that will be better than having just a single large headline improvement that may turn out to be unachievable.

Finally Joanna gifted me membership of the British Library for the year. Since I work in the building I've already started enjoying many of the facilities: bookshop, gift shop, cafés, reading rooms. In 2023 I really wanted to visit some of the exhibitions during my lunch break, but the entrance fee made it uneconomical (£16 for a 30 minute visit just didn't add up). With membership I'll be able to enter the exhibitions at no additional cost, so I plan to make the most of the fact.

The current exhibition on Fantasy: Realms of Imagination looks amazing, but I've held off going in the hope that someone might be generous enough to offer me membership. That will be the first exhibition I go to. As it runs from 27 October 2023 to 25 February 2024 it looks like there's a four-month exhibition cycle, meaning three per year. My plan is to go to all of them, along with other events that might be happening in the library. Sounds like fun to me.

So that's it. Four resolutions which certainly look achievable and which I'll be able to easily assess in twelve months' time. Here's to 2024 and the hope that I have more success with these than I did with my 2023 list.