A Rewarding 2019, and a Promising 2020

2019 — hit the 5-year milestone with my partner. Made a trip back to my hometown, visited Lanzhou, and climbed Mount Hua (took cable cars up and down, but walked all five peaks).
2020 — keep the momentum going. Check off all three northeastern provinces of China.

2019 — watched 12 movies in the theater. I actually sat through the mindless Shazam!. The rest: The Wandering Earth, Pegasus, Detective Pu Songling, Alita: Battle Angel, Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Men in Black: International, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Better Days, Ne Zha, and The Climbers.
2020 — no idea how many I’ll catch; I’ll go whenever something’s worth seeing.

2019 — logged 500+ hours of reading: 267 hours on WeChat Reading, and at least 250 hours on QQ Reading. My favorite novel of the year was Shepherding the Realm (牧神记) by Zhaizhū — a fantasy that weaves in political reform and class struggle in a brilliant way.
2020 — follow Zhaizhū’s new novel Walking to the Abyss (临渊行).

2019 — binged about 10 TV series. Just finished Joy of Life (庆余年) recently.
2020 — go with the flow. A few series I’ve been anticipating for a long time: Day and Night 2 (白夜追凶2), Remaining Sin (余罪), and others.

2019 — finished 0 social-science books. I keep impulsively buying them, but I just can’t get through them — either too thick or too dry.
2020 — aim to finish China’s Villages (中国乡村).

2019 — learned 2 new programming languages: TypeScript (currently the most popular JavaScript dialect) and Ruby (an incredibly flexible OO language).
2020 — Multi-Cloud and Kubernetes are my current focus; also plan to pick up Golang.

2019 — earned 2 certifications: the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (the one that made me want to cry reading the questions) and the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (the one that had me hunting through docs endlessly).
2020 — 2 certs in the pipeline: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional and Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator.

2019 — read 10 technical books: The Linux Command Line and Shell Scripting Bible, Clean Code, Refactoring, Metaprogramming Ruby, Git Version Control, Learning TypeScript, Cloud Native Applications, Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices, Kubernetes in Action (权威指南), and Container Cloud Platform Practice Based on Kubernetes.
2020 — plan to read books on Java programming, Multi-Cloud, and DevOps.

2019 — tried using Jira to manage my personal study plans. Experiment failed — way too heavyweight.
2020 — switch to Trello for tracking reading and study plans.

2019 — learned TDD. Absolutely love it.

2019 — fell down the DevOps rabbit hole. Also love it.
2020 — learn more DevOps tooling.

2019 — committed to writing blog posts, then gave up not long after.
2020 — publish at least one blog post per week.