Starting the Year and Other Adventures

They say the best way to achieve your goals is by planning them.

And, if we follow the SMART goals, the A stands for Accountable (i.e., being responsible to others).

That’s why this year I’ve decided to start publishing them on my blog… which is a bit of a cheat because not many people read this blog…

The thing is, I don’t want to go overboard and set too many goals… or set huge goals either…

So I’ll set 3 SMART goals to achieve throughout the year and publish a monthly update.

What is a year to me?

It may seem like a silly question… but I don’t think it is.

In general, when we talk about a year, we always think from January to December. But just like the weekend break comes at the end of the week, I believe that the end of the year should be when the longest vacation arrives: in the summer.

That’s why my year is the “school year”: from September to August.

SMART Goals for This Year

Publish at least 1 article per week on the blog, every week between September 1, 2024, and August 31, 2025.

To make it easier for myself, I’ll do the following:

  1. Publish monthly updates (12 articles for 12 weeks),
  2. Publish series of articles explaining how I create templates for projects:
    1. Currently, I’m working on a blog template based on Astro,
    2. I’m preparing templates for a backend based on NestJS with PostgreSQL and FastAPI with OpenSearch, and another for a frontend with React,
  3. I’m shifting my brand from developer to team leader/executive specialized in secure development, so I’ll also be publishing about the journey it entails.

Give 1 different talk in at least 4 different communities (by August 31, 2025)

  1. Why 1 different talk? Because if I want to genuinely contribute something, I can’t give the same talk everywhere.
  2. Why in 4 different communities? Because I collaborate with 2 communities: ValenciaJS and Linux Center Valencia. Additionally, I’m a member of Toastmasters. The idea is to go beyond my comfort zone.

Obviously, I’ll prepare talks for the 2 communities I collaborate with… although I’m not sure if Linux Center Valencia will do anything this year.

However, I’m considering taking advantage of the fact that I want to create a backend project template with FastAPI and OpenSearch to give a talk in a Python community.

Automate blog management (by August 31, 2025)

This sounds very generic, so I’ll define it a bit more:

1. I want to maintain a blog in at least 2 languages (Spanish and English)

And I’m considering a third one (like Catalan).

However, writing and translating takes a lot of time.

Now, if I don’t write on my personal brand blog (considering that my brand doesn’t have AI at its core), what’s the point of creating this blog?

That’s why I’ll write in Spanish and let AI do the first translation, which I’ll then review before publishing.

2. I want my articles to have at least a cover image

Just like in the previous case, creating a good cover image takes time. If I can automate the generation of the image based on the article’s content… why not do it?

Obviously, I’ll need to review the image before accepting it, but it’s also true that, over time, better images should be generated.

Anyway, for this year, I’m content with procedurally generated images.

3. Have my articles shared on social media

Sharing on social media also has its challenges.

Ideally, I’d like to generate promotional content, but we can start by simply automatically republishing the articles on LinkedIn (the Spanish version) and Medium (the English version).

For this, I’ll need to figure out how to (if possible) ensure that the canonical links of the articles on my blog appear on these networks, so it’s clear that the “Source of Truth” is my blog.

If I achieve this first step, I can consider this subgoal accomplished.

In summary, automating blog management means:

  1. Automatically translating from Spanish to English and publishing the translation on the blog
  2. Automatically generating cover images, at least procedurally
  3. Automatically sharing the articles, at least by republishing them on LinkedIn and Medium

Of course, I’ll write about all of this on the blog.

So, what do you think? Is it too little or too much? Or not ambitious enough?

For now, this month, I want to publish the following articles:

  1. Starting the Year and Other Adventures (This very article)
  2. Case Study: My Personal Brand Blog
  3. How to Create a Blog with Astro
  4. How to Adapt Astro to TypeScript
  5. How to Deploy a Website on GitHub Pages
  6. How to Refactor Astro to Improve Code Maintainability
  7. Monthly Review: September 2024

Note:

I know September only stretches over 5 weeks, but I want to publish an update every month, and while there will be months when I use it as part of the regular publication schedule, I’d like to avoid it. Especially because I don’t think it’s content that should be published outside of the blog.