Tyler Schade

Some goals for 2025

I've always been a big fan of new years. While I don't believe you need to wait for the calendar year to change to start something, the passage of time provides a natural measuring stick for what you accomplished in the previous year. A new year provides the willing with the chance to set new aims and re-direct their ambitions.

As someone who is naturally excited about goal-setting and achieving personal milestones, one thing I have always found challenging is how to ensure that my goals are durable to last a year, while also being achievable. In past years, my goals have often been nebulous in form, too abstract. Additionally, my goals in aggregate have often been overwhelming; listing 30-40 "goals" feels good to put on paper but it is impossible to focus on that many aims. This year, I am trying to set goals that are specific, realistic and important enough to me to hold myself accountable to complete.

With that out of the way, here are my 2025 goals, in four categories: Physical/Health goals, Intellectual/Professional goals, Spiritual/Personal goals, and Creative/Life-enriching goals.

Physical and Health Goals

• Average 10,000 steps a day: As life and work get busier, I have done a bad job in 2024 of making enough time for simple movement in my day. I'd like to see my phone tell me on Dec 31st, 2025 that I averaged 10,000 steps a day. I currently average around half of that, so I don't think it should be too hard. Taking brief walks during the work day to clear my head and taking a walk to wake up in the morning before coffee should get me there.
• Medal at 2025 USAW nationals in the total: I started competing in weightlifting again this year and won bronze in the total at AO finals in Tuscon! I'd like to medal again at nationals in June.
• Develop healthy sleep habits and fix my circadian rhythm, with a yearly average 85% sleep score on my whoop: I'm not disciplined about my sleep schedule, and this is something I'd like to fix in 2025. My Whoop fitness tracker gives me a pretty good idea of how much sleep I "need" every day, based on that day's biometrics and activity. I probably averaged 70% this year, which means I am subconsciously chronically fatigued. For 2025, I'd like to average 85% of need. This will probably be the hardest goal to achieve.
• Run 40 miles a month and eventually a half-marathon in the fall: I want to prioritize working on my conditioning in 2025, along with my strength. I wanted to be more well rounded in my fitness. Running is something I've come to enjoy, so I'd like to build a solid 10 miles/week baseline over the next 6 months and then try to build up to a half marathon in the late fall.

Intellectual/Professional Goals

• Lead my team to deliver a new product in Q3 of 2025: I cannot talk much about the specifics of this goal just yet, but this year I have the opportunity to lead an incredibly talented team of engineers on some greenfield work that will transform the lives of many developers who rely on shared infrastructure to get their work done. If all goes well, we should be delivering value by Q3 and I'm excited to make that happen.
• Write 12 pieces of content on this website: I had lofty goals of writing more last year, but life got in the way. I'm going to try to write at least once a month, with a mix of life blog posts (like this one you're reading right now!) and technical posts (like this one).
• Become a maintainer for another OSS project in the CNCF ecosystem: In 2024 I focused a lot on being a good open-source community member and contributing to various projects. I contributed to Istio, Open Policy Agent, various OPA subprojects, and Kubernetes (via #sig-release). Contributing to open-source was a great way to grow as a fairly experienced engineer, and I am excited to share that I am now a maintainer of the OPA Envoy Plugin subproject! I'm looking forward to maintaining and supporting that project in the next year, but it's not a very active project (nor should it be, as it's mostly stable and relatively feature complete). This year, I'd like to contribute to some new projects in the CNCF ecosystem and try to become a maintainer for a new project.
• Read 30+ books, with at least 8 being tech-related: Reading opens new doors for me, but sadly in 2024 I read less than I have in any of the past 4 years. I only completed 22 books, which is a far cry from my all-time record of 50 in 2022! I'd like to complete at least 30 this year, and I'll aim for at least 8 of those books to be tech/professional development related.
• Get to an advanced level of proficiency programming in C and contribute to an open-source project in C. I'm a barely intermediate C programmer, but as I move more and more into infrastructure and systems programming work, I want to hone my skills. I'll be writing more about this later, but my goal for 2025 is to become "advanced" in C, which to me means feeling comfortable contributing to open-source and being able to give a meetup or lightening talk about something in the language.

Spiritual/Personal Goals

• Get married to Zoë: Far and away, the most important goal of the year. August 2nd, I will have total victory :).
• Build our social circle and make two new couple friends: as we get married, it's increasingly important for us to start to make more friendships with people who are in the same stage of life as us. I'd be thrilled if we made two new sets of friends we can go on double-dates with and share time together. I think community is really important, particularly as we're getting married young without family close by.
• Visit the cigar lounge at least once a month: New Year's Goals are supposed to be about living a healthier lifestyle, right? Well, going to the cigar lounge is a social activity that I find relatively fun and mostly harmless. I live about 3 minutes from a really nice cigar lounge and don't take advantage of it nearly enough. It's a nice amenity to have access to in Miami that we probably won't have access to forever, so I'd like to enjoy it more this year.
• Meditate more than 100 days: I meditated roughly 55 days in 2025. Meditation is something I struggle to be consistent with, but I grow tremedously spiritually from it and it helps me be a more grounded, happier, kinder human being. I'd like to make this a twice a week habit in 2025, not a once a week habit.

Creative/Life-Enriching Goals

• Snowboard in Montana: I love the mountain west, I love snowboarding. I haven't been to Montana in many years and have never spent significant time there. I have a trip planned for my bachelor party to Big Sky in March, and I am really looking forward to it.
• Visit a new foreign country, solo, not for work but for enrichment: I've traveled nearly everywhere in the United States, but am much less well-traveled internationally. Solo travel is something I haven't done in a while, and I'd like to do this for personal enrichment. Traveling by yourself is a great way to build new social muscles and remember how much we all have in common.
• Increase my chess.com 10 minute rapid rating to 1400. I like chess. In 2024, I got my ranking from from 804 to a high of 1118, and then stopped being as consistent in playing. I'm now sitting around a 1050 rating. I'd like to try to push this to 1400 this year at some point.

I have found that breaking up goals into these categories helps me to be more successful. Since one of my major goals is to write more often on this website, you'll be seeing more of me here! I'm planning to try to keep writing more technical content, as well as just writing about life in general.