Dec 29, 2015

Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2015. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

also: see the lists from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010

Great blog posts read

Most viewed blog posts by me

I’ve been scaling back on blogging this past year and have tried something different instead – Read-Eval-Print-λove. That said, there were a couple of high-traffic posts on my blog.

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

I’ve intentionally reduced the number of technical books that I consume lately, but there are a few that I “found” in 2015 that are stellar.

Favorite non-technical books read

Number of books read

a bunch

Number of books published

0

Number of books written

0

Number of books abandoned

2

Favorite musicians discovered

Interesting games discovered

Piquet – a fun trick-taking game from the 1500s.

Age of Steam – a nasty (in a good way) game about trains and delivering goods.

Northern Pacific – a game about connecting train routes through the Pacific Northwest.

Slither – the second-best use for a Goban.

Neue Heimat – a nasty (again, in a good way) auction game.

Favorite TV series about zombies

The Walking Dead

Favorite programming languages (or related) I’ve hacked on/with this year

Clojure, ClojureScript, Haskell, Datalog, Erlang, Frink

Programming languages used for work-related projects this year

Clojure, ClojureScript, Java, JavaScript, Datalog, Ruby

Programming languages that I hope to explore next year

Rust — OSDev is Rust. Need I say more?

Crystal — This just came onto my radar, so I still don’t know much about it yet.

Black — After seeing Nada Amin’s keynote I was compelled to run out and find out more about Black. Maybe this year I’ll actually use it.

Idris — Idris is

probably the most exciting language that I’ve seen since I found Clojure.

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

Optimization of Series Expressions by Richard Waters (PDF) – a description of “Transducers” in Common Lisp that attempt to solve a similar problem as Clojure’s Transducers, but from a different angle.

Higher-order symbolic execution for contract verification and refutation by Phuc C. Nguyen, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, David Van Horn (Arvix) – Racket is the gift that keeps on giving.

Modular implicits by Leo White, Frederic Bour, and Jeremy Yallop (PDF) – I think I need to read this a few more times to really appreciate its amazingness.

Programming in an interactive environment the “LISP” experience by Eric Sandewall (PDF) – How does your “interactive development environment” compare?

The Reactive Engine by Alan Kay – Kay’s thesis.

Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt (PDF) by D. Sculley, Gary Holt, Daniel Golovin, Eugene Davydov, Todd Phillips, Dietmar Ebner, Vinay Chaudhary, and Michael Young – ML is always amazing right? Maybe not.

Does Having Boys or Girls Run in the Family? (PDF) by Joseph Lee Rodgers and Debby Doughty – Destroying common misconceptions one by one with math.

Still haven’t read…

Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook and a boat-load of scifi

Favorite conference attended

I don’t really like conferences much anymore.

Favorite code read

Life-changing technology discovered

Kiwi Crate

3D printing

State of plans from 2014

Publish (at least) one issue of Read-Eval-Print-λove – I’m right on the cusp of completing a Forth-centric installment, so I’ll count this as a success.

UCT in Clojure – I decided to do it in Java instead to play around with Java8.

Treaps in Clojure – Failure

Release secret project Phenomena – I’ve completely changed how I work on and release open source code.

Publish a card game of my own design – Failure.

Implement Lines of Action in an interesting language – Another Java8 project that I completed to my satisfaction.

Contribute to other peoples’ OSS projects more often – moderately successful as many of my contributions have not yet seen the light of day.

Plans for 2016

Publish (at least) two issues of Read-Eval-Print-λove (not counting the one mentioned above)

Apply 100:10:1 to other areas of my creative life

Release Tathata

Create a programming language that “speaks to me”

Read 100 books

Take more time to discover new music

Onward to 2016!

:F