2014 Recap

It's been a crazy year, so time to take stock... probably.

09 January 2015

More for my own sanity than anything else, I thought I’d better put down a list of things that I’ve learned and achieved in the last year, and then hopefully that’ll form the encouragement I need to learn lots of exciting new stuff this year. Props of course go to an employer, Swirrl that consistently challenge me and force me to learn new stuff, so yeah, that helps too.

Languages learned

Clojure
SPARQL
Bash script
A tiny bit of Haskell
A tiny bit of Supercollider and Overtone, a Clojure wrapper for the SC server

Technical skills learned

Working with RDF data, triples and quads, N3
New graph databases (Fuseki, Stardog)
Converting tabular data to RDF using Ruby
Working with Mapbox/OpenStreetMap
Using Grafter to convert various data sources to RDF using Clojure
Vim
Emacs (turns out learning vim a couple of months before getting into Clojure was a bad idea)
Bootstrapping a bare metal server to run as a Rails or DB box
Devops stuff with Rails - setting up Unicorn etc
Nginx, reverse proxying, all that good stuff
Server-based devops tools - cron, logrotate, monit, taking backups
Setting up CI workflows using Jenkins
Deploying using Docker - at its most complex, a ten plus container setup across two physical bare metal servers
Lots of general unix/linux fu
Working with other data stores - MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Memcached
Deployment of infrastructure across several physical boxes
A little bit more about deployment security and best practice

Frameworks learned

Ember.js
Node.js (if that counts at all - a toy project with Express.js is rolled into this)

Side projects

I kind of wish I’d done more side projects this year.

The new SSD website (Ember.js)
Generation Ships (a board game with a tiny Ruby script component)
Adapting some TextMate N3 syntax highlighting plugins for Sublime Text

Books read

Metaprogramming Ruby
Programming Clojure
Getting Started with SPARQL
Clojure for the Brave and True
Understanding Computation (in progress)
SICP (in progress)

Courses started

Definitely need to get more on it about theory learning in 2015.

SICP

Courses completed

Udacity CS252
Coursera CalArts Introduction to Programming for Musicians with ChucK

Misc

Two talks at NWRUG: one on front end Javascript in Rails, one on Docker

Well, having written all that, could try harder for sure… but it could be worse I reckon. Here’s to 2015!