Old Year's Resolutions
Over the course of this year, I’ve been maintaining a page with resolutions to complete until the end of the year. They weren’t new year’s per-se, as I’ve been adding/updating them throughout the year, but they were close enough.
To make them unique, I’ve added an easy and a hard version to each, so I push further after achieving the easy version. The goal was to make the gold extremely challenging and make sure to not just oneshot both, which worked remarkably well, and I will be doing the same for next year.
This post is mostly a collection of my thoughts on these resolutions, and my wishes for the next year. If you happen to be into programming/climbing (which most of there revolve around), these might be of interest to you 🙂.
Fitness
I’m a pretty active person, with the main activity being climbing. As I like to push myself to climb better, I’ve set as few goals that I wanted to accomplish; let’s see how I did.
All 2019 Moonboard 7a|7a+ benchmarks
I managed to do all 7as, but have a few 7a+s remaining. I’m extremely happy with this one, because the last 7a has less attempts than some 7b+s I’ve seen and was a genuine longterm project.
I won’t be coming back for the gold as I’ve switched to the 2024 setup, but I’m super happy with this one.
2024 Moonboard 7b+|7c benchmark
I **got 2 7b+**s and fell from the last move of a 7c a few times at the end of November, but unfortunately got sick and couldn’t get back in shape before leaving for Christmas.
Coming back for you next year, Moonspawn.
Boulder 7c+|8a outside
It turns out this is hard to do when you don’t really climb outside.
There is one 8a in Riesenstein (the closest bouldering area to where I live) that I know I can do if I give it a few sessions, but they simply didn’t materialize next year as I’ve always prefered to do indoor climbing.
I’ll likely not pursue this further, since I think it’s better to focus on goals that are actually fun, instead of doing something because it’s a goal for others – you don’t have to climb outside to feel good about your climbing.
I feel like this needs to be stressed – climbing is, at the end of the day, a fun hobby that you do with your friends to stay active. You don’t need to go climb outside if that’s something you don’t enjoy as much as doing dynos in the gym (my case, guilty as charged 🤲). This goal was mostly added because “if others climb stuff outside, but I should too”, but it truly tought me to just pursue what I like.
The rock is not getting reset that often anyway.
10s one-arm lockoff | one-arm pull-up
The 10-second hang went relatively okay after strength training for a while, but one-arm is my actual nemesis. Seeing other similarly good climbers do it without any issues is depressing, it just feels impossible.
100kg | 110kg bench
Another resolution that I’m very proud of; the 100 kilograms took a few weeks of bench training, but went up quickly when it came to the actual attempt.
You could say it was a good day, but it took quite a few bad ones to get there 😉.
backflip | frontflip
Too scared. One day.
1x|5x muscle-up
This one was interesting.
It turns out that muscle-ups are extremely dependent on your technique, to a point that it felt absolutely impossible when I was trying to learn them by myself, and then only took 1 session to do 5 in a row once a friend showed me how to do it.
Should have probably done that to begin with, now that I think about it. Oh well…
10k 5:45/km | 5:30/km
Over the course of the year, me and my girlfriend have started running together from time to time. I kind of enjoyed this, so I thought I could do a 10k since I had some decent 5k times (4:40 pace), but I didn’t stick with running much.
I will definitely come back to this, the 10k will be mine.
Programming
Since the other half of my personality is computers, there were quite a few programming-related resolutions too.
All AOC problems (<1s per year)
It turns out I severely underestimated how difficult the remaining problems will get, and I simply ran out of both time and motivation. I think it would take me ~30 more hours to complete and I am coming back for those stars that I’ve missed.
On a broader point, I am keeping this for next year, because I haven’t been doing too much actual programming at my programming job – about 90% of my time is spent on agentic coding, which is useful and necessary for the things that I’m doing, but can quickly build up rust (heh, get it?).
Like anything in life, use it or lose it.
Climbuddy beta | customers
The beta came out, but the customers did not :(.
We’ll see if we can revive the startup in some way in the future, but both me and my co-founder Matěj are working on different things right now. Nevertheless, it was an amazing experience that taught me many valuable things ❤.
1600+ | 2000+ elo chess engine
Absolutely destroyed this one (hovering around 2350).
A collosal nerdsnipe (thanks, Prokop), an article about writing a chess engine, many lost nights (and hair; like I have any to lose), and a bet won.
Cinema.
Other
Read 12 | 18 books
Might have been cheating on this one a bit as I do audio books, but I’ve managed to sneak in 18. I also might have double-cheated, as a few of those are re-reads, which likely shouldn’t count when I repeat this resolution for next year.
Who knows, maybe I’ll actually read one too, but it’s hard when audiobooks are so convenient.
<1h | <30m unproductive phone time
While this fluctuated quite a bit, I’d say that my doom-scrolling days are very few and far between, since they’ve been replaced by me not having the time to actually do that.
A win is a win?
A1|A2 German
This one sucks.
I managed to stick with it for about a month, and then I got lazy, fell out of the habit and didn’t recover ever since. I’m really not happy about this, and will do some more drastic measures starting next year to make sure that this goes better (most likely restricting access to certain applications/websites until this succeeds).
Make latte art of not just a heart
Got a few good ones, but man is this hard.
Release a short story with illustrations
I’ve had a few ideas about short stories and the worlds they inhabit that I thought were interesting, but it turns out that writing is hard – I’m not a good writer and this experience helped me appreciate the people that are.
I really want to do something with this to improve my writing – maybe next year is the year?
Surprise PF 2025 🎉
Whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well ❤️.
Unless you’re the person who shot me and my friend in the back in Arc Raiders yesterday while telling me that you’re friendly, I hope your socks feel perpetually wet.