New Year, Resolutions Old and New, and Project Management Software
New Years!
Well. It’s now been 2024 for a couple weeks now. But hey better late than never to make some resolutions. So let’s end this post with a couple.
Last Year Resolutions
First of all let’s make an assessment of last year’s resolutions. Those being the following.
- Make progress and or complete at least 3 of my personal projects.
- Make more regular posts here.
- Get a job lined up for after Graduation.
- Socialize more!
A simple list that seemed achievable for the most part. Unfortunately though they didn’t all stick.
Completion/Progress on projects
Now I’m going to be honest. I originally went in to this with the plan to finish my project management project first. And then work on a couple other projects. In reality I only “shelved” a project. That being to create a “map” of what Wikipedia article is related to each other. Which is slightly mentioned in this post. And that was only done because it sounded like an interested project that I could use for a class project where I could effectively scale the amount of data I saved to a database, which was a concern due to the project having a requirement of using “a reasonably sized data set”. And in this point I’ve shelved farther development on it due to the SHEAR number of connections I found doing it in that limited sense. As a result I concluded while it would be interesting in the future. I do not have the time to pursue that now. That and there are a couple academic papers on it I found. So that was fun.
As for completing or shelfing other projects. I, rather effectively, used the fact I hadn’t finished my management project to stall the starting or even finishing of other projects. Which is just a problem I have of starting and then forgetting about projects.
But I can actually still mark this resolution as a success. I just have to stretch my original intention. Which was that I was going to complete projects on my list at that time. If I count other projects I did end up completing a couple more. Like a making a Discord bot and setting up a Proxmox server. So taking that into account, success on that front.
More Regular Posts
Another of my resolutions though was to make one regular posts. With the original resolution being and I quote. “Once every two weeks? I really need to determine some sort of schedule.” Which become the original plan. Which then changed in May to be once a month on the 15th or 16th of each month. But given that between then and now I’ve only made a grand total of 2 other posts. I think that plan fell through hard. So I’m going to count this one as a complete miss.
Lining up a Job
I’m going to honestly count this as an almost. Cause I did get a job within less than a month of graduating. And that did take some effort (and maybe a little bit of luck). But hey I’m happy in my current position. And am still there which is great. Below being a table of what it took.
| Status | Count |
|---|---|
| Applications | 74 |
| Rejections | 31 |
| Stopped Pursing for Personal Reasons | 2 |
| Ghosts | 40 |
| Interviews (Some Multiple) | 13 |
| Accepted Offer | 1 |
Socializing
Kind of hard to quantify it but I have been getting out a little more. But I could still improve it. I’m not going to dig any farther into it than that.
New Resolutions
So effectively I completed 2/4 of my resolutions if we want to consider half successes as 0.5. Now what about 2024. Well we’re going to learn a bit from the previous ones.
- Find a better method of managing projects and actually use it.
- This NEEDS done. Something other than Github Projects cause that doesn’t work as well as I would hope.
- Make progress or complete 3 projects
- Repeat of last year but hey. It’s something I still want to do. And I could do better.
- Monthly Posts
- Again a repeat of last year. But I think it’s more obtainable than the every two weeks. I just need to take the time.
- Be more productive.
- This is rather generic. But most resolutions are. I just have felt my ambition slipping recently for a couple reasons and I need to turn that around.
Project Management
Now on to something else. And that’s how I’m going to achieve some of these resolutions. And that’s deciding what I’m going to use for project management. So that began a bit of a search.
Desired Qualities/Features
But first off. My requirements.
First off is that it needs to be free and open source. That mostly being because I don’t want to worry about paying for it at the moment. That may change in the future but for now that’s how I’m going to roll. Next is a preference I didn’t think I’d have originally but found I find of need. And that is that it be web based. Mostly being so I don’t have to access my notes and projects from a specific computer. Which leads me into the other requirement being that I want it to be self hosted on my Proxmox instance.
What I Found
Now in my search I found the following options. Not all of which though that fit my requirements.
| Selection | Solution | My Requirements | Features | Reason For Not Selecting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open Project |
|
|
|
|
| Plane |
|
|
|
|
| Focalboard |
|
|
|
|
| AppFlowy |
|
|
|
|
| Selected | Vikunja |
|
|
|
| PHProject |
|
|
|
Now I’m no one to talk about what systems are the best. But when I went into this I wanted something where I could take my notes, create projects, and track tasks within those projects. And at this point in time. Vikunja seems to fit the bill at least when it comes to the task of projects and tasks. Unfortunately it doesn’t explicitly support notes like I want. But for how well it works for me at the moment I’m going to see how well it works. If anything I’m going to use it for a year. That’s the goal. If I can successfully use it then that first resolution is done. Hopefully assisting me with the others. We’ll see what happens.
Either way signing off.