What I've been up to 3

With 2025 now firmly underway, I thought it time to review what progress I made (if any) on my projects in 2024 and ponder what to do next.

What I was working on

What worked

In 2024 I set myself a loose goal to not start any new projects, but instead focus on either closing existing projects or resume older ones that I had previously abandoned.

I would say this mostly worked out. I returned to several books I’d not read¹ in some time and I managed to complete some projects:

• Writing a script to convert my blog posts to JSON files Mostly this was a success. However, there is still some functionality I’d like to add.
• Learning some Haskell I decided to attend Zurihac last year, which I touched on in my last update and used the opportunity to look into Haskell. This lead me to read Graham Hutton’s Programming Haskell textbook, which was very helpful. I’d certainly recommend to anyone who wants to get a deeper understanding of code - even if you don’t want to be proficient in Haskell.

What didn’t work

I didn’t make much progress learning Q and abondoned yet another attempt to develop a Python programme for reviewing personal finance.

As far as why I stopped learning Q, I just didn’t feel I benefited so much as I had from looking at Haskell so I decided to focus on that.

With the personal finance project, while I felt I made some progress from my last attempted, ultimately I just found the formats of my financial statements varied, it didn’t seem worth the effort to figure out how to transform all statements into a consistent format. Especially when I can quite easily create spreadsheets in Excel, or Google drive, to keep track of everything I want.

So while I would regard trying to write some custom script as a good learning experience, ultimately the project became a rather tedious exercise with rapidly dimishing educational merit.²

What to work on next

What is progress

I’ve been reflecting on my experiences trying to learn to code. At this point I think I’m reaching a plateau when it comes to my skill level. I will continue trying to improve but I think I need to focus more on creating tangible complete projects rather than just learning the fundamentals.

This line of thought has also lead me to wonder if my efforts should be directed more to the final object itself than the creation process. What I mean is that it’s quite easy to get sidetracked focusing on technical details to the detrement of finishing the project.

For instance, with the Personal Finance project at some point I concluded that I could do everything I wanted bysimply checking my statements and making some Excel sheets . Putting so much effort into creating my own programme, just didn’t seem worth it at some point.

So I think for this year I would like to take a more low code approach. I appreciate this is a common term in industry, but what I mean that is, while I still want to learn the fundamentals, if there is a more straightforward to finish a project I should consider doing that instead of reinventing the wheel all the time.

What do I plan to do in 2025

Well I’ve already made some slight changes to this blog, for instance it should finally be indexible by search engines³. Additionally I would like to do:

• Make some further cosmetic improvements to the blog
• Enhance the JSON conversion further
• Try some online courses to improve my skills

There are also a few ideas I’ve been thinking about for awhile, but I’m not quite ready to share those yet…

What I've been up to 3 by William Samuel McDonald is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Discuss

New blog post wherein I reflect on my projects in 2024 and consider what to do in 2025

ql-blog.co/posts/2025-0…

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— Sam McDonald (@sammcdonald.me) January 22, 2025 at 3:08 PM