December 2024

December 2024 was a good month for me. I was convinced by a friend to do Advent of Code, and I committed myself to solving its daily challenges. By the end of the month, I managed to solve 21 of 25 problems. Unfortunately, that’s not 100%, but I’m proud of my progress–this is the furthest I’ve gotten on a long term project in a very long time. Hopefully, this marks the beginning of many more.

My Advent of Code dashboard

January 2025

In January, I committed myself to playing and studying poker every day. My 2024 poker results were pretty terrible, so I really wanted to get good. Every day, I played poker until I got a decent number of hand histories. Then, I filtered for every hand history where I won or lost 10BB or more, sent them to my friends, and we analyzed them together.

The effort paid off–I played 24 sessions and roughly 7000 hands of poker, and ended the month up 1000 big blinds, or 10 buyins. Of course, this is a fairly small sample size and I did run quite well, but I feel pretty confident that I improved a lot. I still frequently find myself in spots all the time where my thought process is unclear, or even totally blank, but it happens less often now. I’ve also gotten much better at managing tilt, and simply walking away after facing a bad beat, instead of continuing playing when my head is still hot. I also learned so many things and I feel I have a deeper and broader understanding of the game now. I also have a greater appreciation now for how much I don’t yet understand about poker, and I look forward to continuing to grind and get better.

My January poker graph

February 2025 and onward

These last two months have shown me the power of consistent, daily effort. Obviously, life happens and I didn’t actually work towards my goals every day, but I tried as much as possible to make sure I never skipped two days in a row.

I’ll have to find some time to finish the remaining 4 problems of Advent of Code, but this month (February 2025), I want to work towards my origami goals. There’s a number of origami projects that I need to work on that have deadlines coming up, so I figure this is a good month to do it. Usually, when I have deadlines, I end up doing everything at the very last minute. This month however, I’m going to commit to working at my goals every day.

For now, the plan is just to fold something every single day. I’ll observe where this leads me, and I’ll add some more specificity to my regimen later.