It’s time for reflection! I’m home a bit sick today, but still scrambling to prepare for a new year. Go figure, I’m a day late on this. Like last year, I’m not going to focus on very specific resolutions though I’ve got a few things to work on in January. Some of this is a direct outgrowth of my personal growth planning workshop (that I would suggest all of yall undertake).

One of my largest undertakings this year was in education. I finally registered at UCF to begin a second bachelor’s degree, and I’m working my way through the early classes now. It turns out that with a BA very few classes carry over to a BS, go figure. That means I’ve got a few freshman level classes mixed in with later classes for the first few semesters, which I suppose is a useful – albeit costly – ramp up. This and online courses dominated my formal and semi-formal education for the year, and it’s going to be interesting to see how I balance that and work in the coming years. At the rate that I’m taking courses it’ll probably still take me the four years to finish. I sometimes look at my plan and think that by the time I finish it’ll be a lot of money spent and being behind on knowledge again, but I keep reminding myself that if I don’t start now I’ll have the same complaint about being behind next year, only worse.

I also started being more open and direct, as I’d felt that I was a bit more passive-aggressive in my dealings in the past, or haven’t been as clear when I’m having an issue, and hoping that things smooth themselves over without direct action. Turns out that they don’t generally, so I started stating cases for some reasons I don’t accept most partner offers, or why the general request to sign NDA’s that I receive in cold emails come improperly and don’t make business sense for me. I also worked on setting expectations with teams, a skill that I’m working on heavily still.

I continued involvement with WordPress Orlando, and stepped down as lead organizer of WordCamp after my third run at it and fourth year of involvement in the group. I don’t plan on leaving though, and the team has already started sprinting ahead on WordCamp Orlando 2016. The meetup group is going to be my main focus this year, especially putting on workshops to help people build businesses with WordPress.

I continued to watch lots of movies, both of the entertainingly satisfying type, as well as plenty of documentaries. I do want to write about what I read and watch more than I do now as a form of self-reflection, but this year I at least wrote about several movies about technology that reflected my views on digital privacy, rights to free speech, and some of the issues with the outmoded Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that still holds too much sway. I also enjoyed yet another Miyazaki film, and wrote about what ‘The Wind Rises’ means to me about passion.

Also, a few weeks ago I finally wrote an imperfect form of a post that had been rattling around in my head since season two of Bojack Horseman came out, and I devoured it over the weekend of its release. Turns out I can be deeply affected by a cartoon. Maybe I need to focus more on consuming media that moves me to action?