At the beginning of last year I made a list of things I wanted to learn:
- Koha templating and themes
- mySQL
- Perl
- Unit testing
- How to cook bagels
- To read long texts immersively again
- Remembering names better
It's a little awkward to look at now, because i didn't make much progress on anything really except learn to read long texts immersively again. This is why you shouldn't make New Year Resolutions.
What I did learn in 2018
It's not like I learned nothing last year though - just not the things I though maybe I wanted to learn. Some of the things I learned in 2018 are:
- how to publish a package on npm
- how Git tags and Github releases work
- how to host a Mastodon instance and, kinda, how Docker Compose works
- Virtual Studio Code exists and is amazing
- the four day, 32 hour working week is significantly superior to the five day working week. (see also: learn to read long texts immersively again)
- there are people working in universities whose entire job consists of trying to find out whether researchers also working at the same university have published any research papers recently. 🙃
- some people get so much from newCardigan cardiParties that they list how many they attended in their end-of-year review blog posts!
Naturally, now that I'm working with academic librarians I've also learned just how much I don't know about how academic and research librarians work - I've been surprised by how many things are really just the same as public libraries, but the differences are really different and things change quickly.
What I'm learning in 2019
These aren't really goals for learning in the next 12 months, because to varying degrees they are all life-long projects, but a short list of things I want to learn, or learn much more about, this year is:
- Python
- Bash scripting
- Australian First Nations cultural awareness - not exactly a small project, as I get older I realise how much I don't know and how much I was lied to as a child
- how to shut up and listen
I guess time will tell if I'm more successful with this list than I was in 2018.