The old year and the new one
January 19, 2014
2013 was probably the most eventful year I’ve had in my post-school life: in the space of ten days this past August, I got married, moved to a new (big!) city and started a new job as a “real” programmer.
Though it seems implausible even to me, I didn’t have any of these things planned at the beginning of 2013. I applied to Hacker School on a whim around New Year’s 2012, and deciding to attend set all of these things in motion. (Well, that, and the Rhode Island legislature finally getting their act together on gay marriage.)
I never did write a substantial Hacker School reflection post, but I am without question a better and more confident programmer, I have a bunch of new friends and my new job (at Photoshelter) makes me much happier every day. I’d definitely call that as a success.
I’m not one to talk about my personal life on the internet much (at least now that the livejournal chronicling my teenage years is gone, hah), but beyond all of the awesome tech-related things that I accomplished this year, getting to marry my favorite person was still the best.
I expect 2014 will be a little quieter, and I’m more than content with that, but I have put some thought into things I’d like to do this year. I’m being not-particularly-ambitious in the hopes I’ll be more likely to actually accomplish everything.
- Finish reading and working through The Elements of Computing Systems (aka nand2tetris)
- Work through at least a few chapters of SICP
- Build some toy projects with AngularJS and React, and possibly give Clojure/ClojureScript a try
- Blog more (I’m doing a friendly blog-post-a-week competition, starting this week, so I hope it will help!)
- More generally, do more substantial things and fewer bite-size things (e.g.: less Twitter, more books; less tiny iOS puzzle games, more getting through the huge backlog of things I would like to play …)
I was thinking along these lines before I stumbled upon this blog post, but Michael Lopp’s essay The Builder’s High is a more eloquent explanation of my fuzzier thoughts.