I’ve kind of liked the idea of yearly themes for a while. After fourteen months of unemployment, I’ve introspected and worked on myself enough to actually plan for the new year instead of letting it sneak up on me, and so I’m picking a theme to start the year off.

This isn’t a goal or a resolution. It’s intentionally qualitative, a mantra to focus and motivate you, rather than a quantifiable goal with a measurable pass/fail condition. YouTube creator CGP Grey has a page for it here but the gist: a theme offers a direction to move in, without defining a measurable goal. The reason for that is simple: a resolution can be failed, and a little failure often turns into a lot of failure. Think about how bad it feels to break a long daily streak, or how many annual gym memberships go unused for eleven months of the year.

In contrast, the point of a theme isn’t the change you make – it’s the consequences of that change. It’s not about hitting the gym regularly, it’s about being able to run longer distances or help a friend move a couch.

I went through some of the specific motivations for this on my other blog, citing certain verses of the Bible as well as a book I’m reading through. Generally, though, it’s a recognition that big changes happen incrementally – or “atomically” if you will.

Picking the Theme

With the general idea of incremental changes on my mind, I spent a week or so mulling over some of the words to actually use as my mantra. Trajectory, delta, direction, or the more biblically-inspired terms of rudder or walk. Out of these, I think diff is unique because a diff is a versatile tool of measure, and an objective and unopinionated one at that.

A diff can be between two adjacent commits, a +/-1 change fixing a typo or switching a feature flag. A diff could also be a git blame, showing where a bug was introduced – the tool doesn’t care whether the code is good or bad, or really about any feature of the code. This also makes diff a versatile tool, because it can compare two extremely different versions of a file – say, subsequent major versions, or releases that happened a year apart.

This is the versatility that I wanted, so I can apply it to every facet of my life. The same way diff doesn’t care if the underlying data is Markdown or Javascript, I want to focus my attention on incrementally improving my fitness and my spiritual life.

The Year of Diff

So that’s the theme: The Year of Diff. I want to focus this year on building the daily disciplines and changes that will help me be better over time. Every day is a building block for where I will be in a year’s time, and my job is to use that day wisely. With the larger picture to remind me why I’m making changes, the smaller picture will help me narrow down my focus to the little things I can do.

There’s a few specific parts of my life that I want to focus on. I talk about spirituality more in my other post linked above, but there’s still plenty of professional, personal, and technical skills I want to curate. To begin with, I kick myself every day when I feel sluggish; I had a solid workout routine for a few months, and then I stopped for no good reason. I was chipper and alert, and I did some of my best work then. Now that my journey to Richmond has finally settled down and the holidays are behind us, I want to intentionally get back into that habit as I get into my new job. (Also, it’s a pretty big bummer seeing a goose egg in my habit tracking app.)

Elsewhere, I want to focus on building my career. A job is one thing, but I want to start being more intentional about where I’m going without losing the focus on where I am. Working at a tech startup that was something of a moonshot never really gave me the opportunity to sit back and assess my growth, though my manager did a stellar job of mentoring me nonetheless. Now that I’ve spent some time thinking about my portfolio and job prospects – more time than I care for, frankly – I want to be more intentional about the skills I curate and present. I have an eclectic background – a degree in biomedical engineering, and experience in systems engineering for autonomous vehicles – so I want to get more focused. And the nice thing about diffs is that they can remove more lines than they add.

Additionally, I’d like to start forming a platform of my own. That’s part of why I started this blog – to be a thought leader. I want to get into the industry’s trends, and eventually be one step ahead, so I can help others prepare for them or at least be ready to react. I don’t expect I’ll get published by Forbes or Nature this year, but the sooner I lay the foundation the sooner I can develop a reputation.

Concretely, just to follow along with the official system’s theme page, here’s some ideal outcomes. In a year, I will:

• Be able to join a moving party and contribute reliably.
• Be noticeably more alert during the day.
• Be a recognized contributor in at least one open source project.
• Find a path to professional growth and set some specific goals.
• Start being a recognized leader on my team.
• Post regularly to this blog.

Personally, I’m looking forward to 2024. I know there’s reasons not to, but I believe my life will be better at its end than its beginning, and I hope yours is too.