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2025 Goals

Happy New Year 🎉

Like many others, I have spent the last week thinking about what I would like to achieve in 2025. I’ve managed to narrow it down to three broad goals.

Deepen Rust knowledge through independent building

2024 was all about learning introductory Rust, and I am happy with how much I achieved. I managed to:

And I learnt so much working through these. It also gave me a lot of enjoyment, a feeling of freshness after having spent so long in the world of front-end.

For 2025, I want to build on this feeling but I also want to leave behind the comfort blanket of tutorials by building something on my own.

So I have set myself three quantifiable sub-goals that are directly linked to the broader goal. They are:

I am hoping that this will deepen my Rust knowledge and allow me to explore new areas of software engineering which I may not necessarily get to touch as part of my day to day.

Write more, publicly

I have always enjoyed writing, but I have never given myself the chance to enjoy writing publicly. I have had a mental block over it. I think my writing won’t be good enough, no-one will be interested in what I have to say, and that it’s embarrassing. All of which I’m sure are very common themes. But for 2025, I am going to try and push through and see where it takes me. So I have set myself the goal of writing at least 5 posts as well as sharing them on LinkedIn. I am choosing LinkedIn because it’s where I have the most connections.

Play competitive tennis again

Until I was about 20, tennis was a huge part of my life. I was practicing regularly, traveling up and down the country to play tournaments, and assisting coaches to earn some money. This meant I spent a lot of hours on the tennis court, and unfortunately, it had the unexpected effect of making me fall out of love with the game. Life then took over. I found a job in programming, moved away from my hometown, and tennis drifted into the distance. This led to a 13-year hiatus (with the occasional game sprinkled in) that came to an end last year. I joined my local tennis club and have had a great time getting back into it. I am starting to rediscover the enjoyment I felt when I was younger, but it has also made me realize how much I love competing, especially in singles.

To help scratch that itch, I am committing to playing four one-day tournaments throughout the year.

And that’s it. If I manage to move the needle on these things over the course of the next 12 months, it will certainly add to what I hope should already be a great 2025.

Have a good year!