My Goals for 2021
Published: 2021-01-03 21:55:50

This is an entirely self-serving post, and is only about what I plan to achieve in 2021. This might not be the most interesting post for readers, but there's one reason for doing it so publicly.

## Accountability
Simply put, if my goals are public and I don't at least try to hit them, then I'm clearly just full of hot air. It also gives me a solid base to outline what they are, and my reasons behind them. Goals are easy to think of. It's reasons which then provide a grounding and give the foundation of success to a goal.

These goals aren't huge by some standards, but I feel that, with some work, are achievable for me given my other commitments. That's one thing people need to consider when they set themselves goals - what are their other commitments? Be that work, family, friends, or other hobbies. Adding more goals into a busy life is a recipe for failure. 

## The Goals
### Blogging
I'm going to increase the frequency of posts. I'll be doing two types of post:
1. Tanuki Tuesday - a series of posts I dedicate to GitLab, and the functionality it has. This serves the purpose of getting me to learn more about GitLab, as well as allowing me to show the appreciation I have for the platform. It's a platform I love, with a lot of features at different tiers. I want to show others what it can do so it can bring them some of the benefits it has brought me.
1. General Posts - these will continue to be my ongoing learning and thoughts. Some of these will also be GitLab related, mainly around [CI/CD](https://www.garybell.co.uk/tag/ci-cd/), so be warned there's a lot of GitLab love coming from my blog for the next year! These will be posted on Thursday's.

### Open Source
I'm going to regularly commit to an Open Source project. More specifically, I will average 1 merge/pull request per month. It's not a lot, and some months may result in more. But that's my baseline, 12 merge/pull requests on open source projects throughout the year. That doesn't include my own projects, which are small, and largely unused.

It's been a few months now since the [DigitalOcean Hactoberfest](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/). I had signed up to take part in it, and even managed a single pull request - though it was after the event became an opt-in for repositories. Where I fell down with the whole commitment was I haven't found a project to regularly. I need to spend some time looking into which projects I feel are right for me, and then look at how I can help. Until then, I'll likely be working through some MRs on GitLab.

### Learning
I regularly bring up and brush off the joke that I am a technical dinosaur. With technology moving at an ever faster pace, it's only a matter of time before I get left too far behind. I'm used to provisioning physical or virtual servers, but haven't had time to get into containerisation. I recently attended some of [KubeCon](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/), and enjoyed what I saw on there.

I use a basic level of [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) with my GitLab CI/CD pipelines, but I really want and need to learn more about containerisation. Firstly to help improve the performance of my pipelines both personally and professionally. But also so I can understand how I can best utilise the technology to benefit future projects I have - again personally and professionally.

[Redis](https://redis.io/) is a technology I only started using in 2020. I have come across it before, but never had the chance to explore its abilities. At the moment I'm working on an e-commerce project where it is used as both a cache system for improving page speed, and also as a fast-cart system. Looking at the different [Redis Modules](https://redislabs.com/modules/get-started/) available, there's a lot of additional areas where I could implement it, and boost performance of projects. I want to learn more about those modules, and how they can be used, either individually or together, to provide efficiencies in data processing for projects I am involved in.

So there you have it, the things I want to learn this year are:
1. Docker - how it works, and how to use it
1. Redis - what modules are available, and how can they be used

## Summary
So there you have it - my goals can be broken down into 3 simple statements:
1. I am going to blog more about GitLab and technology - sometimes both at the same time
1. I am going to contribute to open source
1. I am going to learn containerisation with Docker, and also how to use Redis beyond its basic offering.

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