December 2015 Archives

2015 Wrap

A quickie retrospective post on 2015 so I don't have such a very empty year on the blog.

New things I tried, some of which succeeded:

  • Made some improvements to my side project SankeyMATIC, including: more customization features, eliminating at least one browser-crashing bug, and improving the overall quality of my JavaScript code.
  • Started using my github account, including making the SankeyMATIC code officially open-source.
  • Made a couple of pull requests (a.k.a. code-change suggestions) to other people's projects which were accepted.
  • Gave a lightning talk on SankeyMATIC at a DataScience DC meetup. It went reasonably well.
  • Took a short course in R Graphics. Went from knowing no R to passing the course handily.
  • Participated in a GSA Hackathon for the first time. (Primary lesson learned: go in with a team if at all possible. It's not geared to the size of project I as an individual am likely to succeed at, and no one's looking to add team members on the day of the event.)

Some things I enjoyed:

  • Another year of being @medley's primary conversational partner. (The things you all miss by not surveilling us, I swear.) The closest you can get is probably following both of us on Twitter.
  • Another year of dad-hood, now with a second-grader who's playing good baseball, getting good at playing piano, and working his way ahead in math.
  • They Might Be Giants' new album Glean
  • Reading about the Hamilton show (now on Broadway), getting the Hamilton soundtrack, listening to it with genius.com open to the annotated lyrics
  • Frank Turner's new album Positive Songs for Negative People
  • Joe Jackson's new album Fast Forward (and seeing him on tour here).
  • The CBS show Person of Interest (Thanks to Laurel Krahn for the recommendation).
  • The podcast This Week in Blackness, which is a fairly eye-opening, brain-expanding listening experience for a plain white person such as myself.

A few other 2015 highlights that come to mind:

A few goals for 2016:

  • More improvements to SankeyMATIC -- enough so that I'm happy to stop calling it (BETA).
  • More attempts to contribute to other people's code.
  • Write more. Write a lot more. (A perennial wish, admittedly.)
  • Learn more data science skills.
  • Keep improving my data visualization skills.
  • Try to make something using Swift.

Not looking forward to in 2016:

  • the ugly political campaigns already well underway

I'm sure I'm forgetting numerous things, but that's a fair amount of links to throw out in one post.

Happy New Year to you & yours.

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from December 2015 listed from newest to oldest.

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