Another year has passed, so it’s time to take a short look back and think about what to do in 2016.
Previous years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.
2015
The year went by very quickly. Out main goals was moving into our new house. Sadly, that was not possible, so it’s also 2016’s goal.
On other fronts, my freelancing career continued nicely. I switched clients late 2015 and I’m now working for a smaller company. A nice change of pace.
In 2015 I started to remove some obligations from my plate to make space for new endeavors. I’m not sure I succeeded, but it was fun doing all kinds of smaller things:
- I read 13 books. The subjects ranged widely, which was a good idea.
- I winded down my main side project. It’s still running, but I’m no longer accepting new signups. I don’t intend to pursue this anymore (see my 2014 review for more details)
- At the end of 2014, a forum I run was overrun by spam. I migrated it to Discourse. The migration itself was successful and was an interesting technical feat. The spam is gone, but nobody really cares much about the subject anymore (PVR’s are dead since Netflix)
- I had some fun with static site generators.
- CloudBees left me with little choice, so I now self-host Jenkins.
- I learned Meteor and applied it to a project. Discover Meteor is a great book if you want to learn. It was fun, but the project itself doesn’t really interest me any more.
- I mined and bought some BitCoins. Not sure what’s next.
- I started getting into Scala (I followed Martin Odersky’s course on Coursera and I’m currently reading Pragmatic Scala). I don’t really know why Scala won over Groovy, but it seems that’s the way it is. Both language are perfectly fine, so I’ll just go with the winner (for now)
- I fixed an old DCC player. I wasn’t sure I could pull this one of. But after a stressful 4 hours, it came back to life and was able to play all my cheesy 90s tapes again 🙂
- I started playing Kerbal Space Program
2016
I want to continue the same trend as last year. Lots of small things. Some items on my list:
- Read more books (I’ve set my goal at 20 this year)
- I just finished building a RepRap Prusa i3. I intend to learn how to actually use it properly.
- Going back to the DiscogsScan Android app was great. I have a lot of features I’d like to add. Including some where I can use Scala 😉
- Try to remove additional distracting side projects from my life. I’m starting by selling one (if any one is interested, otherwise, I’ll just shut it down)
- I would like move a few sites (including this one) to Jekyll. Hosting them is so easy compared to WordPress.
- Also something that has been nagging me to study deeper: Apache Spark and big data in general.
- Fly my nano quadcopter more (actually a hexacopter) and understand how to tweak and maintain it.
- I also got a little bit into value investing last year. I may continue that. However I’m not sure if I can offer much interesting advice.
- There’s a lot more on my list, including robotics, papercraft, Zabbix, playing more Kerbal Space program and other games and much more
Enjoy the new year
Lets see what we can make this year.
PS, check out @mijustin’s project.
PS2, Image at the top is a 2016 monkey keychain that you can print from Thingiverse.