New Year's Resolution
31st of December, 2025 ★ personal ★ ~7.5 minute read
Happy New Year's eve everyone! With 2025 coming to a close very soon, I thought to reflect back on this year, and most importantly, talk about stuff I want to do and achieve in 2026.
First off, I want to say that 2025 was a very confusing year for me. I can't honestly pinpoint if it was a good year for me or not. At one hand, I graduated high school, and enrolled in a university I wanted to go to. I met so many amazing people that I'm grateful to call friends, both online and offline. I got in contact with a really good friend this year and I can't be more thankful for it. No joke, I don't think I've ever had this many friends since Covid that have a vast knowledge of media and are fans of stuff I enjoy, too. I also managed to grow my YouTube channel over the summer break (Which, by the way, we had a five month break!) and meet a lot of content creators in the same niche, a lot of very amazing people that I still hang out to this day.
I also have to mention this blog, and my decision to start working on stuff. I did start a personal website, also on Neocities, but I quickly dropped it because I didn't know what to write. I honestly don't mind it, since I didn't like the design of it at all. I am way more proud of the design of this site than the first one. But still, for the first time I am creating my own projects, growing my portfolio, and learning a lot of new stuff that I'm super excited about. But...
On the other hand, the last three months have been the most stressful parts of the year for me. I don't think I've had this much stress and panic over school. As much as I was enjoying my time in university, I am slowly starting to hate it. Tight schedules, professors and teaching assistants not caring enough to explain the material, extremely confusing and downright rude way of grading exams (One little mistake that you made at the end of a problem? You'll get zero points. If you think that is fair or not I'll leave up for you to decide, but I personally think it isn't.), along with different problems that I could honestly make an entire blog post about, it honestly has not been fun at all. Imagine spending 2-3 hours studying every single day, and feeling ashamed because you didn't study enough.
This is why I want to make a New Year's Resolution. To be fair, I never made one, as I thought they didn't have that much meaning, and that I'd set myself unrealistic goals that I most likely wont achieve. But as this year comes to an end, I thought about it. If I set realistic goals, that aren't vague, and most importantly, not set a ton of goals, I think it would be worth it at the end. And, because of the unfortunate situation with university, I as well think it could be a good motivator to do stuff.
Below I'll list some goals I made and want to achieve in 2026. I'll try to go into detail as much as possible with the goals, to not have anything vague. I'll also first talk about the more serious goals (that'll help me with my career and my self-learning journey), then the more unserious goals, or goals that aren't that important, but something cool to achieve and have.
★ The first goals are related to programming. In university, we started learning Python and JavaScript, and in 2026 I want to expand my knowledge of these programming languages. I am aware that I shouldn't learn two languages at once, so I want to put focus on Python first, as I am way more knowledgable on it than JavaScript. First off, I want to go over the entire basics of the language. To be fair I don't have that much stuff left, as I have mostly OOP to learn, which I have already started doing. I'll most likely use the roadmap.sh course on it, and complete the stuff there. I also want to learn at least one framework, and that is Flask. I've seen a lot of back-and-forths about Django and Flask, but I've heard that Flask is better for beginners, so I'll start with it. And of course, there are projects that I want to make, but I believe that going in detail about every single one is rather unnecessary, so I'll mention only one big project that I wanna make in 2026: a productivity web app. It'll be a web app that has a todo-list, a pomodoro timer, along with a stop watch, and a countdown. It'll also have a journaling system, with the ability to make entries each day. It'll most likely have a level-up system as well, but that'll be for aesthetic purposes. I also have in plans a desktop version of it too, but I feel like that's way too advanced and not worth it right now.
★ To continue on, since I don't want to completely stop with JavaScript, I plan to currently leave JavaScript for game development. I do want to get into back-end programming, and JavaScript is probably better in some aspects, but I'll leave back-end development for Python right now. As for JavaScript, I want to learn Phaser.js, and have one big project: one site filled with small games. Think of it like Newgrounds, or Armor Games, or any other site that hosts flash games. I want to recreate major games that were popular in the pre-NES era of games. I feel like that could be a good introduction into game development, and an excuse to not forget JavaScript.
★ I want to read at least one book a month, and journal every single day. I love doing both things, but I don't do enough of them. I feel like with how tight my schedule is for university that one book a month is more than enough. I have in mind what books I want to read, and I will try to read as many mindful books as I can. You'll see what the books I'll read when I review them on this blog :) As for journaling, I mostly don't do it because my days aren't that exciting, it's mostly the same dance of "wake up -> study -> do personal projects -> go to bed", but I feel like this shouldn't matter that much, as entries then aren't going to be long. I even bought myself a fancy notebook for journaling. I love doing it but yeah, life is just not that eventful.
★ Now, these should probably be on top of the list, but I decided to put them here because they don't seem that realistic, and are the most vague. I want to start with Leetcode, and try to solve as many problems as possible. This is the issue, I have no idea how many I should do, and what problems to do. I'll most likely use Neetcode's roadmap as a reference point, and go on from there. I'll most likely aim for 100 problems solved, and hoping I can at least solve one hard problem. And the last thing is, I want to try to find a job in 2026. This again, should probably be high on the list, but I decided to put it here since I don't want to disappoint myself if I don't achieve it. Currently in Bosnia it's really hard to find a job (due to a lot of reasons that I really don't want to get into), and I don't want to feel mad at myself if I don't find at least an internship in 2026, but it's something that I want to work towards, due to the problems in university. If I do find one, I'll then transfer to be a part-time student, which I'm hoping will ease my stress on university.
★ To ends things off, I want to add a part of this website that's related to gaming challenges. I love to challenge myself, and most importantly, do official challenges that are apart of the game. I have a lot of plans for various games I want to play and do, and I want to create a nice spreadsheet to showcase them. I'll of course upload it to YouTube so you can watch them. To give an example, I want to get into Kaizo Mario, and beat as many Kaizo hacks as I can. There are no rules and no set games I wanna do, but probably one Kaizo hack, and one misc. challenge should be enough.
This'll be the end. There was more stuff that I wanted to add, and had in mind, but as I said, I want to make a list that I actually want to accomplish next year, and not a huge list of tasks and goals that I'll most likely be overwhelmed by. For example, I could've added my interested in learning Godot, and Korean, along with me wanting to learn how to do mathematical proofs, among other things. These are very good goals, but I feel like it'll just be way too much stuff on my plate, and especially how vague they are (What do I want to accomplish with Godot? Do I want to make a game, or games? At what level of knowledge would I be satisfied with Korean? What should I learn how to prove? What would be my end goal? These are all questions I honestly don't know, nor want to find an answer to right now.) I will try my best to accomplish these goals. I will also forgive myself if I don't accomplish something. At the end of 2026, I'll make the same blog entry as this one, and review the stuff I did. Hopefully by the end I'll have accomplished at least 80% of the stuff I've said here.