Monthly review: January 2015

Posted on February 2nd, 2015 by Sacha Chua
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2015-02-01 January 2015 – index card #monthly #review

Last month, I wrote that in January, I planned to:

Set up a rhythm of monthly Emacs hangouts and Emacs chats: Scheduled a few more
Shift my finances around a bit so that I'm more relaxed: Refilled, yay!
Sort out some small snags with consulting: Smoothed out
Get the exercise ladder habit going again: Associating microwaving with exercising is a small start.
Make little improvements around the house, so it doesn't end up waiting for vacations: W- has been doing most of this, so I've been focusing on cooking instead.

It was a good month for thinking about questions and goals. Eric's update on his Quest of Awesome at the Quantified Self Toronto meetup inspired me to list accomplishments, goals, and questions, and I'm gradually making sense of those things.

I've been relaxing my self-imposed one-post-a-day limit, since there's so much I want to write about and I've built up quite a backlog. I need to think about how to keep this manageable. Sometimes I really like having posts scheduled but not posted, since that allows me to update them when I find little bugs in the code or opportunities to improve. On the other hand, there's something to be said about faster feedback cycles. Hmm.

At work, I've learned a lot about using Tableau for recursive queries, dashboard actions, and filters. Level up! Speaking of data and analytics, my self-tracking got mentioned in the Toronto Star.

Focusing on Emacs microhabits has been paying off nicely. I'm still not as fluent as I'd like to be in terms of abbreviations and window-switching, but I'm better at them than before. I'll continue working on those habits in February, and maybe I'll delve into Helm too. I've also been writing little Node and Emacs Lisp scripts to automate parts of my workflow, which makes me happy.

In February, I'm looking forward to:

Preparing for some projects
Hosting another Emacs Hangout
Learning more about Helm (in Emacs)

I'm experimenting with a combined outline that includes my blog posts and sketches so that things are logically grouped. Since I have lots of sketches, I've skipped the ones that have already been included in blog posts. Sketches are the ones that start with the date, and blog posts have regular titles. Might be useful, might be noisy, but I won't know until I try. =) Here's what I wrote and drew this month: