happy 2025 welcome back to your daily rhythms most of you are probably getting back into the swing of things uh that is the case for our house we just underwent uh one of the rare snow days um that we get in tennessee i want to do something that we do most years most years we come to uh january and and many years before this we've talked about resolutions well ahead of january i want to talk about resolutions today i want to give you a challenge as you design and continue to iterate on your resolutions there's two parts to this challenge we're going to go over part one we'll talk about today's sponsor and then we'll go over part two part one part one is exactly what i just mentioned iteration all right this is gonna lay the groundwork for part two but iteration what do i mean by iteration most people when they set a resolution uh the concept there is that they are resolved that they have made a choice that the only thing that was left to do in order to accomplish this thing was to choose to do it now if this was the case and it's likely that we would have made this choice before if this was something that we wanted then how is it that the only thing that's remaining is to make some arbitrary choice what does it mean exactly to have a resolution another way of thinking about this is that you now have the resolve you have not only made a choice but you're willing to do something about it perhaps more willing than you were before again this kind of definition is still lacking it doesn't quite really tell me what has changed your intention your effort your energy all of those things are now going to be funneled optimized pointed towards whatever you are resolving to make true in your life that is the concept of a resolution but for so many people resolutions are this uh kind of a unilateral singular thing they resolve to do x they resolve to write a book to lose 15 pounds to start working out we resolve to be a better teammate many of these things have very uh you know assumed criteria of success and we don't think about our resolutions usually in terms of accomplishable goals and so i want you to imagine that your resolution is something that you can iterate on what does that mean it means that you're going to potentially create a goal and we'll talk a little bit about that a little sneak peek for the second challenge that i have for you but you're going to be able to stay flexible and iterate on whatever it is that you're trying to do to accomplish that goal iteration is something that you can do to accomplish that goal and you can do it something that we learn in our jobs in our day-to-day what if we don't do iteration if we don't engage in some kind of iterative learning and iterative improvement and uh you know the cycle of taking feedback from ourselves from our experience from our environments from the people around us feeding it back into our actions and learning from that okay that is the challenge that i have for you how can you incorporate iteration into your personal goals into these uh resolutions that you're making whether the resolutions are professional personal doesn't really even matter what are you doing to set these personal goals in a way that they are more mature than just being resolved just being resolute our willpower is rarely the winning strategy our willpower is fickle it runs out of control most of the time we're wrong at the beginning and iteration gives us the opportunity to be right over and over again we get a chance to try over and over again so that is the first challenge we'll talk about the second challenge right after we talk about today's sponsor when i say website builder i imagine what you're probably thinking is that's too good to be true there's only so much you can do with those there's limited control or it spits out bad code but how about a node-based builder that lets you add full stack javascript code to any site with wix studio you can spend less time on ui coding hosting and security and instead focus on custom logic and functionality and you can do a lot more with wix studio you can spend less time on ui coding hosting functionality that actually matters to you and to your customers develop in your preferred coding environment for example online in a vs code based ide or locally through a github integration either way with wix studio you're deploying in a click extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions and custom built features with apis and integrations and when you need to speed things up wix studio's ai assistant is on hand to generate tailored code snippets troubleshoot bugs and retrieve product answers in seconds then all that is neatly wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind working a developer first ecosystem go to wix studio.com thanks again to wix for sponsoring today's episode of developer team so the first challenge first challenge about your new year's resolutions that is to iterate on them find ways of improving whatever it is that you have resolved to do this kind of implies by the way that your resolution is not simplistic that it is uh that it that it allows for iteration allows for shifting you might change your goal a little bit right you might change the tactics that you're using to achieve your goal and you might change the tactics that you're using to achieve your goal you may shift your strategy all of this is acceptable right there's uh you know you are the kind of the the total stakeholder in the situation and so you should allow yourself the opportunity to iterate to iterate to fail and learn from it and then shift now traditionally speaking whenever you fail your resolution fails with you why is that does it mean that you've changed your mind does it mean that you're no longer resolute who is it that is saying that you have to stop it's very likely that if you were to shift your mindset away from failure being a an abject thing right that you can't re-approach your same resolution because now you've broken your resolution as if it was a promise to uh you know a very strict version of your resolution and you're not going to be able to do it again evolution of yourself evolution of yourself evolution of yourself evolution of yourself your alter ego or something. Let's avoid that and iterate, right? Iterate in the ways that we've learned how to do as software engineers and problem solving in other areas of our lives. The second challenge, the second challenge that I have for you, this one's going to seem a little less insightful at first, but I want you to listen. I want you to pay attention to the intent here. First, most people, when they set resolutions, do not know what they want to measure. Most people, when they set resolutions, don't know what they want to measure. And most of the time, this is because they don't really know what the resolutions are about. So for example, you may say, I want to lose weight. And so what are you going to measure? You're going to measure the weight that you lose. But you haven't stopped to identify what is it exactly about losing weight that's going to achieve something that I care about? Maybe what I actually want is to be healthier. And this is a very common example, but we could fill in the blank with a bunch of very similar examples. Like I'd like to get a raise or a promotion at work. Okay. What about it? What about a promotion is important to you? What about a promotion is important to you? What about your raise is important to you? What are you trying to do with the money that you're making? Is there some agency that that opens up in your life that you care about? Okay. So the naive measurement here is, did I get a raise or not? A slightly better one might be, what does my budget look like? How much money do I, have left over once I've budgeted for all of my expenses? That might be a slightly better measure. But what I want to encourage you to do and the challenge that I want you to face here is measuring something that is closer to the why. Measuring something that's closer to the why. It's very easy for me to measure the weight that I lose. It's very easy for me to measure how much money comes in in my paycheck. It's very easy for me to measure how much time in, you know, raw minutes am I spending with my family? What's harder to measure and perhaps more important to measure is whether I am healthier or not. What kinds of metrics will actually tell me that? I would challenge you to avoid attaching to a singular metric and instead start with articulating the why of your goals, of your resolutions more clearly and choosing a few metrics, a few metrics to measure. So this, this is very much inspired by the very, very worn out framework of OKRs. And similar things. Your objective should be your why. Your intention is to become healthier. You want to become healthier, right? Your intention is to have more free time. Your intention is to develop stronger relationships with your family or with your friends. Your intention is to feel less stressed. And maybe even that one has lower, level intentions. Why do you want to feel less stressed? I want to enjoy my life more. Your intention is to enjoy your life more, to improve your overall sense of well-being, right? So there is some, there's some kind of lower level why. And very often we get caught up in the much smaller details of these goals and in, you know, kind of tracking the KPI, right? If we're going to use business terms, we track the number of pounds on the scale. But not paying attention to other measures of our healthfulness. So the challenge is for you to articulate more clearly, more completely your why, your objective. And then instead of attaching to the easiest things to measure, perhaps they will still be easy, but find something to measure. Find the things that actually tell you, am I achieving the thing that I care about? I am resolved to do something. I am resolved to take action in order to become healthier. I'm resolved to take action in order to grow in my career, in order to grow my relationships with my family. I'm resolved, but now I want to make sure I'm taking the right actions. I want to iterate on that stuff. So the measures that I have should remain, through my iterations. It is very possible. There are people listening right now that imagine that somehow losing weight is going to make you more healthy, but in fact, it won't necessarily have a strong impact on your health at all. And so you would be measuring the wrong thing. You would be taking the wrong actions, but you might be achieving your proposed resolution, even though you're not necessarily achieving the outcome that you really care about. So focus on your why, focus on your objective, focus on the actual thing that you care about, and then find measurements. And this is the part that you can't skip, by the way, right? Find measurements that actually correlate or, you know, support that the thing that you really do care about is changing in the direction that you want it to change. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I encourage you in your resolution making. This is actually, there's good research saying that resolutions, you know, that these kinds of transitions, the marking that we have, the cultural marking, like a new year, is actually a very good time to try to take advantage of it. Even though, you know, in our kind of logical brains, you can say there's nothing different about January 1st, 2025 from December 31st. 2024. That's logically true, but we still have a, there's still an effect, right? This is a research that Daniel Pink brought together in his book, Win. I encourage you to check that book out if you're more interested in this topic. Thank you so much to today's sponsor, Wix Studio. With Wix Studio's developer-first ecosystem, you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionality that matters the most to you and your customers. You can develop online in a VS Code-based IDE. You can extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions, and you'll ship faster with Wix Studio's AI Code Assistant. Now, all of that is wrapped up in an automatically maintained infra for total peace of mind, work, and developer-first ecosystem. Go to wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X studio.com. Thanks again to Wix Studio for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. As you may know, if you listened to the last episode of the show, we've just went over the 10-year mark, the 10-year mark of this show. That means we have 10 years of episodes that have gone out. That's something like 1,270 something. I don't know exactly how many right this second. It's a ton of content that's totally free to you. Why am I telling you that? 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