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.