2016 Personal Challenges

Happy new year 2016.

Annually I challenged myself with some new skills and some targets. Few years ago, I challenged myself to learn Mandarin, because it is the most spoken language in Asia. Therefore, I took a Mandarin short course and also self-learning it via Youtube.

I had also challenged myself to learn functional programming paradigm and tried to master one of the programming languages that used that paradigm. My choice was Clojure because it is using Lisp dialect. I was coming from PHP and JavaScript, so I should learn another dialect for broadening my horizon. Maybe now I’m still far to be a master of Clojure (LOL); but at least, I’m fluent coding with it.

In 2016, I’ll give some challenges again for myself:

1. Learning another programming language. The requirement is static typing, compiled to native code, and using different dialect from Lisp and C-based syntax. My choice will be OCaml, it is coming from ML (Meta Language) dialect. The target is I should deploy at least one production system which is written in OCaml.
2. Learning Finnish. The target is hunting the northern lights from Lapland with my wife and communicating with Finnish people in Finland. The number 2 is the hardest, but challenges are needed to push me beyond the limit. I’ll write the progress here.

Challenge accepted!