2018 was a year of personal growth. This blog post aims to summarize 2018 before I set goals for 2019.
Learning
My First Think Week: I did a Bill Gates style think week this year. I spent the week alone reading books about operating system and programming language design. The knowledge gained was useful for some technical challenges at work related to a custom programming language and virtual machine used in FarmBot. I intend to do this again in 2019.
Books: Below is a non-exhaustive list of noteworthy reads:
- Language Implementation Patterns
- To Sell is Human
- Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
- Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
- OS Concepts - A.K.A. “The Dinosaur Book”
- Thinking Fast and Slow
- 1,286 blog articles - often via text to speech while commuting.
Travel and Events
- Attended API Mixtape in San Francisco, California.
- Visited old friends in Phoenix, Arizona.
- Entered a half marathon in Galena, Illinois
- Entered in the Fox Valley Marathon.
- Made a fool of myself by dressing up like a fox in the Saint Charles Holiday Light Parade.
Finished Projects and Accomplishments
- Helped organize a Secure Scuttlebutt meetup in Chicago after a weeks long technical deep dive on the subject.
- Moved the makerspace to a new larger location.
- Published browser-speech to NPM
- ~3,500 commits on Github
- [fun] Built a points-based attendance leaderboard for fun competition at the makerspace. Live demo. Blog post TBD.
Ongoing Projects
Next Up
Now that 2018 is wrapped up, I will discuss my plans for 2019.