2014: year in review

By •  • tagged year-in-review

Inspired by my friend Prakhar's 2014 review blog post, I decided I'd write one as well. Hopefully it'll end up being useful for me over time.

Open-source

I had a good year of open-source contributions, certainly better than my last few.

Github Contributions

Closer.js is probably my first big project that's open-source in the true sense of the term. It's a port of the Clojure programming language and its core library to JavaScript, so you can parse and run Clojure in the browser! It was on the Hacker News front-page for a few hours, so that's one item off my bucket list.

I also took up Android app development in earnest and started developing no less than 3 (!) Android apps, although none of them are even close to done yet -- that's the flip side of being too detail-oriented, and I desperately need to get better at letting go.

Hackathons + online contests

I had a great run of these in 2014.

  1. Closer.js was created for the CodeCombat Parser Challenge. In the course of this incredibly fun project, I picked up Clojure, CoffeeScript, and test-driven development; revisited the basics of parsing and compilation; attracted contributors to my Github project; and got acquainted with many awesome people. Now I see the long-tail benefits of actively participating in the open-source community.
  2. Angelhack - we hacked together a prototype mobile app to turn any Android phone into a game controller. It wasn't easy playing NFS Most Wanted with it, but hey, everybody thought it was cool!
  3. Androidathon - another Android app: super-fast customer service for consumer electronics, cars, etc in India.

Blogging

I started blogging again recently with the help of Ghost, and subsequently got another few hours of fame on the HN front-page with my blog post on common C++ gotchas. I don't think I've truly gotten the hang of blogging just yet, but I'll come around to it eventually, because programmers should write.

Books

I read 11 books in 2014, of which the 5-star ones were Steve Jobs, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Tau Zero, and Genghis.

2015 plans

  • Ship an Android app already
  • Learn UI / UX design, but at the same time learn to let go!
  • Contribute more to open-source projects
  • Blog occasionally (once a month, maybe?)