2015 just ended (is it already a month?) and like the last 7 years here is my year-end review post and plans for 2016. I generally publish them in the first week of January itself, but this year started as a very busy year and this post got pushed back by a month.
Personal Highlights
2015 was a special year for me from my career perspective since I worked the entire year from home. Towards the end of 2014, I joined 10up which enabled me to work from home and this work-place freedom has also helped me to move back to Chennai, my hometown after being in Bangalore for about 6 years.
Working from home has enabled me to spend more time with my family, especially with my 2-year-old son and I am very glad that I choose to work with 10up.
Blogging
Well, one thing is for sure. I was not able to spend as much time at blogging as I wanted in 2015.
Let’s look at my blogging stats for 2015. These stats were generated using my “Year End Stats” WordPress plugin.
I guess the graphs are self-explanatory. My blogging suffered badly in 2015. I have written only about 17 posts in 2015, which was slighly better than 2014, where I wrote only about 15 posts. But the average length of my posts has increased and I am happy about it.
At the beginning of 2015 I wanted to improve my blogging skills and even committed to a blog post every week, which clearly didn’t happen. I guess I bite more than what I can chew.
So in 2016, I am going to commit myself to about 25 posts for the year, which will be roughly 2 posts a month.
Reading
Like blogging, even my reading commitment suffered from over commitment. I took a challenge to read at least 25 books, but ended up reading only about 19 books, but I kept up my promise of reading a couple of books in Tamil (my native language) and I am happy about it. You can checkout my 2015 reading list at Goodreads.
For 2016, I am planning to read at least 15 books (roughly one book every month) from a range of topics. Wish me luck here 
Speaking and Conferences
In 2015, I spoke in WordCamp Pune, which was my first WordCamp. Even though I have spoken in lot of conferences and events, this is the first time I spoke in a WordCamp and I am very happy about it. Overall I spoke in about 4 events in 2015.
In 2016, I am planning to speak in more WordCamp’s and if possible outside of India. I have already applied as speaker in both WordCamp Mumbai and WordCamp Europe. So expect to see me in lot more conferences this year.
Pet Projects
In 2015, I contributed to two major version of WordPress and I am very happy about it.
I am planning to continue it this year and concentrate more on my WordPress plugins. So expect lot of updates to my plugins this year
New Skills and Continuous Education
I have the habit of learning something new every year. In some years it will be a new programming language and in others it will be a new framework. In 2015 I concentrated more on my JavaScript skills and learned both Backbone and Grunt which I also used in my job.
In 2016, I am planning to continue my concentration on JavaScript and focus a bit more on my frontend skills. I have already signed up for a React course. So expect some JavaScript related posts this year
How was 2015 for you and I am interested to know what you are planning for 2016. Please a leave a comment or post a link to your blog post about your plans for 2016.
Happy new year everyone!
Wishes for your efforts on reading and writing.
Thanks
Glad to hear that you are spending more time with you son.
so which one is it gonna be after javascript? Might i ask what prompted you to go for Javascript?
personally , on my side, i had one heck of a year. Had to clear two language certification course. One lpic certification, plus a few federal exams.
On my learning side, tried a new linux `nixos` and was pleasantly surprised. Declarative syntax and effiecient option to rollback, something that i missed in arch. Don’t get me wrong i still like arch but the whole rollback was something i wished would be as smooth in arch as it was in nixos.
And my haskell went tangential (again). now i am recalling all the category theory i did in my mathematical Physics.
I don’t know yet. There are lot of frameworks in JavaScript that I may have to learn.
Recently there is a huge push of JavaScript in the WordPress world. Since I have decided to concentrate more on WordPress for my career I am refreshing my JavaScript skills.
I had a brief affair with Haskell back in 2010. So are you learning it for fun or for work?
>I had a brief affair with Haskell back in 2010.
Now i am interested to know the full details. How did you come into it, and how did it proceed.
>So are you learning it for fun or for work?
I know i should be learning something that is more used in industries but i am just learning it for my own understanding, and also the fun part.
Here is a rough summary:
I started haskell way back but found it not very interesting then (partly due to lack of libraries at that time, plus i was also looking for something that would do number crunching faster, FORTRAN, C and C++ were attractive candidates then) Most importantly, haskell threw a lot of compiler errors, more than any of the other 3 above mentioned languages and that was part of my reason for proceeding with it . But now i went back and wrote a few of my older scripts in haskell and after fixing whatever the compiler threw back at me, the code ran without any runtime error. Infact in my personal experience, 98% of the time, if the program compiles under haskell then it would run fine. No more fixing memory leaks and since i am not using it for any production stuff, i am happy with haskell for now.
P.S: Also STEM folks are not the best coders. so that is there.
As I said it was a very brief encounter
The motivation was that I has some free time and I wanted to try out some functional language. Haskel was very cool and I liked it. But then I found out that there wasn’t major practical use (at that time) and I slowly lost interest.