Some New Years Goals - Programming, Data Science and Team Building!

Happy New Year again!

We are now into Day 3 of 2018, and @ecoinstante and I are still in a contemplative mood, considering carefully all of our goals for this promising new year!

We both definitely want to write more, and we will be continuing that goal from last year by using the Steem blockchain. To continue to take pictures and, maybe more importantly, to do interesting things that are picture worthy, as well as write about what we did and saw, will be high up on our list this year.

_{Colorful snake wants to be written about}

Another thing that I have been working on for a while is trying to learn 'computers'. This is a wide field, and the learning will probably never end, but I continue to take new steps and learn new things.

This year, I have signed up for DataCamp, where I can take classes about R and Python, and get some help connecting to SQL databases in order to model and process data. I just paid 90 dollars to have 1 year of access to this site, which is a 'New Year's Sale', and apparently a great promotion.

I don't usually spend that much money on education, preferring to audit courses on edx.org, coursera.org, or find other free sites, and I will continue to do that this year as well. But having this whole curriculum in one place, and now paid for, I hope will motivate me to brush up on and modernize my data science skills this year.

_{Garden Contemplation}

As I skim through some of the introductory modules, meant to teach the basics of programming which I have learned many times, I come across a wonderful sentiment, one that most courses won't admit to. Laziness is a powerful motivator. 'Hacking', scripting, programming, even permaculture recognizes this!

Take a look at how data camp describes it:

_{Lazily Ironical}

I am the hardest working lazy person that I know. I work day and night, on half a dozen different jobs and projects, all because I dream of a world in which I could be lazy. I want more hammock time. I want to automate my processes. I want to outsource and create employment.

All of these require work, but they are because I am lazy, or maybe, wish to be lazy one day.

_{Framing the shot}

Last year we participated in a selfie competition hosted by @papa-pepper. We had an absolute blast, and in the final days we required a lot of help. We were able to use something as silly as the Daily Selfie Challenge to help bring together our multi-disciplinary team for a fun purpose.

One thing that surprised me is how big our team is getting. Now, to be clear, they aren't in any legal sense 'our' team. But they are some of the local people that we are working with, in different ways, to make the world a better place. And they came together to make it look like I have 10 heads. What a great group!

_{They couldn't all quite get a smile in the same shot though}

So we will continue this year, learning and doing, building a team and executing plans for a better future, a future which is bright!

Love and Light to All!