10 Oct 2025 ------------ Retrospective: Yearly goals It's near to the year's end, and it's about time to think about yearly goals. I think about yearly goals, like every year. But I am never organised enough to do it like some people who would write them down and stick the paper onto the wall to track their progress. I am just thinking about them and most of the time I would be doing something very different from what I "planned". There are loads of examples - like one year I was somehow getting interested in building up my LinkedIn profile. I bought a few e-books, studied quite intensively, then applied for a few exams, got a few online badges, and put those badges onto LinkedIn. I tried to write my personal description and job experiences in LinkedIn style. That was close to the year end so I thought I would study even more and pass a few more exams to enrich the profile. The result, and I think is quite common to everyone who have a nice profile on LinkedIn, was having my inbox bombarded by recruiters who had no idea what job fitted in with my past experiences. On the other hand, the groups were filled with marketeers posting advertisements. The whole thing has no added-values at all, so at the beginning of the following year I have deleted my account...Of course I didn't go for more exams. I think I am just interested(?), amused(?), feeling satisfied/not satisfied(?) in counting what I did for myself, and what else I can do for the next year? I think it is quite like a child pouring all the coins out from their piggy bank and count how much money do they have, and how much more money they will earn in the next year. Life is really like a box of chocolate, and sometimes when you pick a piece up it may not be even chocolate at all. I didn't think I would have switched to, or more precisely forced to take the opportunity to switch to OpenBSD after the old laptop died. That moved my VPS to OpenBSD as well and led me to a few rewrites in C for the only-for-myself web services, plus a very different VPN setup and got to know PF, the firewall. PF got me into the idea of buying the Radxa E20C, to build a router by myself, and learned a bit more about doing things in OpenBSD. I am also grateful about the fact that it is hard, if not impossible, to setup Zephyr Project on my OpenBSD mini PC. That led me to asking the dumb question online and got some wonderful advice to learn embedded programming with AVR microcontrollers. Picking Zephyr was an uninformed choice - that was the only SDK/RTOS/magic that quite easily helped me build a working program for the M0 boards that I bought without really knowing what I was getting. I then spent quite some time with it, but not really knowing what was happening behind the scene, pretty much like programming with high-level languages. It was really life-changing when people in the industry suggested to read datasheets - truly a real way to actually understand what a microcontroller is doing and how to tell it to work. May be a bit of waste to throw away the "fruits" from the tinkerings with Zephyr Project, but the feeling of backing to simplicity is quite refreshing. Joining a very old online community and start writing "blog entries" on it was also not part of the plan, but brought different kinds of joy and experience, which is quite nice. Buying a pocket computer in disguise was definitely not part of the plan, but I am now SSH-ing through it...I think I still have quite a long list of things I want to do and "still finding time to start". That seems to be quite a few things. I don't know if I am feeling happy or sad now, may be just "oh, seems to be some progress". I think it is quite like the wrong thinking I got back when I did my first work trip - "if I do something right, or something wrong, or simply do nothing, the trip will still end in a few days, so may be I will just do something". May be I will just do something more till the end of the year, and probably next year. Wish you all a happy new year!!!!!