Setting my tech goals

I don't like New Years Resolutions. Arbitrary time delineations seem like a terrible way to plan your life, and every day starts a new year. Still, just because the calendar will flip in a few days, I don't want to avoid thinking about the future. So what do I want to learn and improve in my technical skills over the next year or so? Well, most of the following can be summed up in two "meta goals": write more code and get back to math and computer science.

At the moment, I plan to work primarily in Python and C, although that could change depending on projects and other similar factors. Today, I write most of my open source code in Python, and my closed source code for work leans even more heavily in that direction. C was my first love, though, and I still use a subset of it when working with Arduino.

1. Submit a solid proposal to speak at DEFCON. I have no direct control over the acceptance of my proposal, but I can make sure that I work on something cool and submit a proposal that's worthy of serious consideration. Almost certainly this will deal with OSINT or network forensics.
2. Complete the Matasano Crypto Challenges This will help me achieve a good hacker-level understanding of cryptography. Recent news events provide part of the motivation to learn a lot more about all this.
3. Complete at least 100 problems from Project Euler, including writeups. This project scratches a number of different itches for me, all in good ways.
4. Build a really cool hardware project. I have a recent interest in hardware hacking, mostly around the so-called "Internet of Things", and so (likely in conjunction with my daughter) I want to build something cool, albeit undetermined right now.

For clarity's sake, of course I have other things I want to accomplish during the next few months to a year. Some of them almost fit here (more educational advocacy and volunteerism) and some don't (personal and family goals). But the above looks to me like a solid set of things to work on.