Instead of New Year’s Resolutions, I pick a yearly theme to help me make progress on my goals.

In 2023, it was to Make Art with Friends, which led to me joining Toastmasters and a sketch group. I also started a meetup for local software developers. In early 2024, I extended it by joining The Useful Authors group. Then, in 2024, I chose the theme of “Heavy Lifting” to encompass my fitness program and the work it would take to write a book. Last year, it was Just Keep Swimming, which meant to keep working on my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, and get it done.

This year is about strength training, learning Spanish, and marketing my book. I chose to represent that with the theme “Fuerte Y Suerte”, which means “Strong and Lucky” in Spanish.

The Strong and Spanish part are clear. By lucky, I mean in the sense of writing a bunch of content on this blog, my podcast, my email list, LinkedIn, and other places and hoping that one of those things takes off (as I described in Blog Posts, Randomness, and Optionality). I think of each post as a lottery ticket with a low fixed cost and huge upside potential. Randomness is the Great Creator.

In the past, this led to My Guest Article on Tech Debt for the Pragmatic Engineer and making the front-page of HN, which I described here: My “Show HN” Follow-Up for “Swimming in Tech Debt”. In my life, it has led to writing a book for Manning, being invited to conferences, jobs, etc.

A couple of days ago, I revived my podcast, and the next episode will be about getting lucky.