Taking a look at what all happened in 2018, and all the adventures we’ve been on.

Talks Given

All the conferences and meetups I’ve given talks at. Some of which are repeats of the same talk, though given that Reducing Enumerable took 200+ hours and Scaling Christmas took 50+ it’s a bit hard to get more unique talks to that level.

RubyConf — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure”

Southeast Ruby — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure”

Let’s Sketch Tech — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure”

Fog City Ruby

Women Level Up — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure”

Modern Dot Web — “Scaling Christmas — An Illustrated Adventure”

WaffleJS — “Scaling Christmas — An Illustrated Adventure”

(view at 1:29:00 or so)

Square Internal (5 talks)

Talks given internally at work, including Scaling Christmas and numerous talks on Ruby testing, internals, and other aspects. Some of which being confidential so a number is all we get here.

Articles Written

Now there are a lot of these, so we’ll break them into categories by content. If you would rather see them by difficulty, see this tweet:

On Meta and Mental Health

Posts covering meta-topics and addressing mental health issues

On Functional Programming

Posts covering functional programming and how it can be applied in Ruby, either practically or purely esoterically because it was fun to write and implement.

On “Reducing Enumerable”

Posts related to the creation of Reducing Enumerable, my major talk of the year, as well as a text version of it containing the same images and some expanded storylines for extra fun.

On “Let’s Read” and other recap series

Posts recapping material I’ve read or attended. I intend to keep these series going, but other matters (namely vacation) stalled me until after the 2019 line had been crossed.

On Advanced Ruby

Topics addressing more advanced Ruby tips and tricks, some of which being truly evil and heretical in nature. In other words, a great deal of fun but very bad for production code in some cases.

On Ruby 2.6

Posts covering (at that point) upcoming features in Ruby 2.6+

On Operations

Posts covering Operations work, including another fun illustrated adventure story post.

On Miscellaneous Topics

Anything that didn’t particularly fit another topic.

Most Popular Tweet

It turns out that turning Yukihiro Matsumoto into Santa is very popular, a fun joke that all started with Eric Weinstein implying certain similarities:

Favorite Lemur

So off of polling various individuals, it looks like the most popular lemur so far this year is….

Chartreuse!

Next year you’ll be meeting her sister, Jade, a creation of a certain younger brother of mine. Now what adventures will those two be up to?

Only time will tell.

Keeping Count

So that brings us to the final numbers of 2018:

30 articles written

12 talks given

Hundreds of hours of lemur drawings

What’s Next?

Oh there are some truly major projects I have coming up, some of which I haven’t been mentioning quite yet. You’ll see in due time.

My hope this year is to speak at more conferences, including ones potentially outside of Ruby, and continue to spread stories and whimsy across the developer world.

I already have several ideas for new articles and other tutorials, but I want to know: what is it that you want to learn next? Who knows, I may start writing more on it.

2018 was fun, we’ll see what 2019 brings.