See the parent page for more details: 2017 goal tracker
Starting from the bottom - more or less from most to least successful
Get over the fear of using [REDACTED] already
This was reasonably easy! It was mostly a thing that needed commitment to actually get me to do it, wasn't aiming very high and was very likely to be done anyway without mentioning it in the goal tracker.
The result of using [REDACTED] itself? Mostly boredom, disappointment, and concluding it's not my thing. Which is a success! I was fearing something that didn't need to be feared, and moved on to more interesting problems.
100 kanji
Surprisingly easy! Completed by march. At that point I naively estimated 600 by the end of the year, ignoring that they get more complicated and that i already knew a handful of the easiest ones before starting.
Halfway through the year I shifted goals to aim for JLPT, stopped adding kanji and created the words deck (which has the readings in hiragana together with the kanji, so it's significantly easier), and after JLPT i created the radicals deck - which isn't directly useful to read anything, but will help in the long term to recognize parts of future kanji.
My deck stats now are: (mature cards / total cards)
Hiragana: 137 / 138 Kanji: 272 / 359 Radicals: 152 / 214 Words: 553 / 610
I failed the july 2017 JLPT, by 2% of the required score. My vocabulary knowledge was the strongest part, the rest not so much. Reading speed was lacking.
I tried again in december, and I haven't received the results yet but I didn't study as hard as I should have, so my performance was more or less the same as the previous time. There's a small chance I may pass but not holding my breath. I decided I won't aim for JLPT at least for a couple of years.
50 radare commits
I got to 4. This one failed because it was something for which I was lacking motivation and decided that public commitment could push me to do it. It didn't. Oh well.
I haven't done a whole lot of reversing this year either
Learn rust or go
I still don't really know rust. I know go though! Go is stupid simple. Of course when I learnt go i decided i'd switch the goal to rust because it felt too easy. And so this is a failure. The public commitment mechanism didn't do much here, the main blocker is still the same - I have nothing for which
My feelings on whether C apps should be rewritten in rust also fluctuated through the year. At some points I felt serious pressure to do so, at some points I was angry at the meme.
Sometimes the meme felt headless, as the rust community pointed it as something only outsiders do. Sometimes the meme felt like something that only existed because someone cherry picked examples to make it seem more serious than it really is.
Maybe no one really said it explicitly, but it was always present when security is discussed - "this is C's fault" getting read more like "this is your fault for using C", implying rewrite despite how crazy that would be.
Later on I became more okay with just keep doing what I'm doing, taking care of my own garden. If others want to do it, that's cool.
Break broken RSA
Nope. This one is powered by shame. I still think it's unacceptable I haven't done this. But that strategy isn't working, so I should try something else.