Reflection on First Year (2024)
Ambitious
Over the course of 2024, I completed 7 projects, have at least 5 others in progress. Granted, I’m counting this site as one of the projects but :man_shrugging:.
As I had suspected initially, this has turned out to be quite an ambitious project. My lofty goals of completing a project every month quickly fell apart when the first project ended up taking multiple months to complete (partly because I was depending on others). It’s with a sincere sense of irony that I am just now getting around to finally writing these reflections, nearly 4 months into the new year.
Still, what I did manage to accomplish was pretty huge. I’m grateful to have had this site as a dumping point to chronicle the progress and to reflect on each step of those rather monumental efforts. (I mean, I literally published a game… right??).
I started writing this post on 31 December 2024, and it’s taken me a while to really collect my thoughts on what I’m trying to do with this site. After having a rather serious health scare in January 2025 and realizing I needed to slow down and step back from a lot of things, the idea of finishing 1 project per month in 2025 was obviously already made moot.
I need to pivot slightly.
New Direction
I’ve realized that this site does two things for me:
- It gives me a place to archive stuff I’ve done
- It gives me a place to reflect on progress I’ve made
My docket of work is constantly growing, mutating, and rotating around. Things get added, finished, put on hold, etc. Sometimes for quite a while. Compelling myself to do 12 projects in a year was forcing me to both inflate smaller projects (towards the end of the year) and also deflate other projects earlier in the year (don’t want to fill up too fast!).
That wasn’t working for me.
What I need instead is a running docket that reflects what I’m actually doing. I need the site to not force me into a particular schema.
I’ll keep the naming convention (Year-Iteration, like “2024-03”), which will reflect when the work was started. The square badges linking to the projects will now also include the year, since there is already some overlap.
The site will still be named “12things” because, well…because of reasons.
But the homepage will not longer be pre-populated with an ambitious list of 12 things, and will instead just be “uncompleted works” and “completed works”. If I want to put a time-scope on a work, I will. Otherwise, the work will continue until it is completed.
I’m also introducing a slight tweak to the displays: Some projects that feel like they are on hiatus but are as-yet incomplete will be marked “shelved” and will no longer display on the homepage. These are projects for whom I’ve put in effort and want that reflected in my archive, but that I’m not planning on working with anymore for now.
Onwards!