Breaking Free from Failure to Launch - Kevin Homan

I have a love/hate relationship with New Years resolutions; I love to make them, I hate to follow through on them. For about the last half decade, I tell myself I’m going to learn a coding language, year after year I never follow-through. Sticking with the topic of things in my life that are and have been languishing, my personal portfolio site is another of those things I had previously maintained that in recent years I haven’t done anything with. 2025 is going to (hopefully) be the year of breaking this mold, by refreshing my online portfolio and hopefully using it to keep me accountable in my coding journey.

Starting with the portfolio. I’ve been maintaining a Gatsby based portfolio probably the last four years or so, and while that’s served me very well, I haven’t been doing a great job maintaining it for at least two of those years (and likely more than that). I guess I’m treating this whole thing like a bit of a fresh start, so I’m migrating over to an Astro based portfolio. I’m using the Astro Boilerplate template developed by Remi Wg of Creative Designs Guru. As I am not natively a developer, I am looking for something relatively easy to pick up and learn, easy to deploy and maintain with the ability to host via S3.

For the perpetual New Years resolution, I’m going to try something a little different this year. Instead of waiting until the end of December, and making a resolution I likely won’t keep. I’m going to attempt Advent of Code. The site was mentioned recently in one of the Dev Slack channels I’m a member of at work, and I think a group of employees will be participating and posting about their journey there. So, that gives me an avenue to accountability. I plan on using Python, as the language fits nicely with my work as a cloud engineer. I’m also going to use this blog as a space to write about my journey, so the next 25 days are going to be rather busy if I actually stick to this. If I can do this, completing an Advent of Code challenge, plus writing about it for the next 25 days I figure I’m off to a good start. Problem is, then I need to figure out what is next from there. I guess that’s a good problem to have?

So, follow along. It’s either going to be super quiet, or rather loud around here for the next month or so. Hopefully I can learn to break free of this procrastination that has plagued me for most of my adult life.

Kevin