Long Term Goals

In my interviews at Mozilla Mike Morgan asked me what my long term goals are. This is a topic I've visited once before. Here I am about a year later. My life has changed quite a bit, but I'm finding it hard to list any long term goals I've achieved.

I told him one of my reasons for joining Mozilla, which is learning how to deal with scaling projects to the extremes that they've had to. Another is to someday reach the level of Kenneth Reitz and others like him in the open source world.

Goals are hard to achieve if there is no quantifiable metric for progress and success. Goals that are more abstract, like learning to scale software projects, are much more difficult. The best I can do is reflect periodically and make sure I am learning the skills I'd like to. The same goes for becoming a better citizen of the open source world.

Goals have different natures as well. For instance, I have the goal of becoming a consistent blogger, so I decided to blog at least once a week for a year. I can tell if I am doing well by how many weeks I've done it and how many I've missed. Another type of goal is like my goal of getting into Master league in StarCraft 2 which has an end condition, and even some intermediary goals of getting to Platinum and Diamond leagues.

I'm going to take the next week to really consider my goals and try to come up with a list of 1, 2, 5, and 10 year goals. Of course the longer the goal the more abstract it'll likely be, but I can at least use it to guide myself.

Initial SC2 Goals

These are the things I'm working on for the next month:

Consistent Macro.

Problem: Once I have to micro at all, I have a hard time catching back up on my resources. Also my probe production has a pretty steep drop off after I have a few buildings to look after, especially once I have taken my natural.

Solution: I plan on working on this by tracking my average unspent resources and aiming to lower it to a reasonable level. I need initial stats before I can say where I want it in a month

Keeping my calm under early pressure.

Problem: Cheese gets me worse than it should. Even if I can repel it, I've taken a huge hit to my economy because I spent time on micro and forgot to macro. Not only that, but I don't make units to defend as often as I can which leads to it being distracting for longer. Together the two make it so cheese eventually destroys me.

Solution: I plan on working on this while laddering and during my Saturday night practice sessions with my friends.

Both are things I can continually improve on, they are fundamentals. But as fundamentals, I need them to be at least not weak before I can start to worry about other things.

StarCraft 2 and eSports

I've recently found camaraderie with some fellow software developers who play StarCraft 2. Not only that but they get excited to stay up late and watch the big league matches. Note these are people with solid careers, some of them even with a significant other and children. These are not the living in mom's basement, unemployed or working a dead end job and the other general stereotypes of people who get really into video games.

I'd been considering whether I wanted to start taking my SC2 playing a bit more seriously and try to push myself into being halfway decent at the game. I waffled back and forth until I watched Day[9]'s #100 Daily. I challenge anyone to watch this and not get (at various points) choked up, excited, happy, and finally no longer ashamed of their love of video games.

I've been a gamer most of my life, but I play that card close to my chest. Tell someone that not only do you play a game 4-5 hours a week, you don't just call it playing it is practicing and training. You'll probably not enjoy the reaction. Especially since if you are willing to spend time practicing, you have likely become pretty passionate about it.

The above video and Revenge of the Nerds both have something in common. Nerding out on something can be great, especially if it is something that makes you happy. Programming is that way for me, which has led to some great opportunities and friendships, perhaps SC2 will be the same.

I have no delusions of becoming a pro gamer, I'll be taking it more serious but not that seriously. My goal is to make it into Master league, meaning top 2% of players in my region (North America). I'm currently Gold league so I still have a long way to go. If you play SC2, add me on Battle.net: Wraithan + 968.