2013 Word of the Year: Open

My word/manifesto/goal/guiding principle of 2012 was: “Create”

That still applies, but I thought it would be a good exercise to choose a new word for 2013. And that word is: “Open”.

This applies to my work: instead of hosting my side projects on private repositories, I will keep them public, whenever possible. (Doesn’t apply to work for my company or clients, of course!)

To kick that off, I’ve pushed a few repos:

• https://github.com/nomatteus/goals-app
• https://github.com/nomatteus/daily-ebook-deals
• https://github.com/nomatteus/to-transit
• https://github.com/nomatteus/dinesafe
• https://github.com/nomatteus/dinesafe-ios
• https://github.com/nomatteus/litsum

First immediate benefit of working on a public repository: can’t take shortcuts like hard-coding API keys in my code (had to strip some of those out/change & invalidate API keys from some of the above repositories).

What about personally? What does it mean to be open?

• It means less hesitation when talking about myself.
• It means giving my honest thoughts & opinions whenever possible.
• It means being more outgoing.
• It means being more vulnerable to what other people think; it means worrying less about what other people think.
• It means posting more of my writing publicly.
• It means updating my blog more often.

I’m not really sure that this is a good idea, but I’m going to give it a shot.