The 2020 Mid-Year Review

Phew.

What a year.

I promised progress reports, so here’s report #2 (the first one being a tweet posted on March 1st).

Read 10 books (7/10)

I’m doing well in this category, although it’s padded a bit with a couple of graphic novels I read to my son. I’m on track to read ten books excluding those, so I’m feeling okay about that.

A photo of Design as Art.
  1. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  2. Code by Charles Petzold
  3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
  4. 1984 by George Orwell
  5. Over The Garden Wall, Vol. 1 by Jim Campbell
  6. Over The Garden Wall, Vol. 2 by Jim Campbell
  7. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda

I’m currently reading The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero. The books I have queued up for the rest of the year are So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, Zed by Joanna Kavenna, and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon.

A photo of The Shape of Design.

Write 10 blog posts (7/10)

I've been writing more this year than ever, and some of these posts represent a significant chunk of work, for instance, Building a Culturally Irrelevant Recommendation Board was the follow-up to a month-long React project. I’m very happy with how these are turning out. Brian Lovin says this post doesn't count towards my goal, so 3 more to go!

  1. Adding RSS to My Next.js Website
  2. Twitter Defeated Me
  3. The Codemod Side Quest
  4. Home Screen Hack
  5. Making a Minecraft Server Status Page
  6. Building a Culturally Irrelevant Recommendation Board
  7. Life, Art, Nostalgia

Release the next chapter of Lilt

I created some additional areas to explore in @familiarlilt, but have not gotten started on the proposed admin interface that I mentioned in my 2019 in Review post. I’m not sure I will, either. I’m content with the work I did on it, and have other projects I want to expand on.

Complete 3 online courses (0/3)

I made progress on Kent C. Dodds’ Testing JavaScript course, but have not yet completed it. I’m currently looking into some SwiftUI courses due to the recent updates announced at WWDC. I wanna make more apps!

Draw, illustrate, animate!

I'm proud to say I’ve been making this goal happen! First, I have a Twitter thread of drawings. I like ’em.

A car drawing.

Additionally, I created more pixel art for a game I'm working on.

And finally, my son and I created two movies so far this year. The first was a stop-motion LEGO Minecraft movie, and the second, a Mister Rogers-like episode starring him called Mr. Owen.

A still from Mr. Owen.

And that's it! It's been good to have these distractions in the time of COVID-19. At this rate, I expect that I will be completing all of my goals by the end of the year.

Until next time! 👋