Tag Archives: 2013

Looking back at 2013

Another year just ended and it’s time for publishing my year end review like the ones I did for the previous few years.

Personal Highlights

2013 was a milestone year for me in the personal front. I spawned a new process 😉 (Translation for those who didn’t get it: I became a dad).

Like all parents know, this is the most rewarding as well as the most demanding experience. Luckily, my little one has kind of gotten into a proper sleeping schedule these days and so my (and my wife) zombie days are in the past.

This would explain why I was kind of out of action (less blog posts, not much public speaking etc) in the last few months. Hopefully, I should be back to action in 2014.

Open source contribution

Back in the early days of 2013, I decided to do at least one contribution per day to open source projects. I was able to maintain this streak for more than 4 months (124 days to be exact). A look at my github profile, should explain everything 🙂

I also took over the Arduino Makefile project and worked hard to steadily increase its popularity. Right now it has around 250 stars and close to 100 forks in Github.

I also moved most of my WordPress plugins to github. This also increase the popularity of my WordPress plugins and also user contributions.

Reading

Towards the end of the year, I decided to take a reading break and this helped me to complete around 10 novels from Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation Series.

Blog Stats

I used my Year End stats WordPress plugin to generate the following stats.

2013-no-posts2013-no-comments2013-total-post-length 2013-avg-post-length

The total number of posts that I have written in 2013 has increase a little bit and I am happy about it.

I am planning to write a little more in 2014 as well. Hopefully my little one allows me to do so 😉

What’s in for 2014?

I am definitely planning to spend quality time with my family, especially the little one 🙂 As most parents know, the first few years of a kid are the most rewarding ones and I don’t want to miss out on it.

Assuming that I will have time after that, I want to do the following as well.

Books

I definitely want to complete the Foundation Series that I started. I still have another 5 books to complete.

After that I am planning to read favorite person Chris Hadfield’s Autobiography: An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I already have the book, I am just waiting to finish Foundation Series.

Also, if you have recommendation, please let me know. I am planning to read at least a dozen books this year.

Learn R

I am also planning to concentrate a little bit more on Statistic and Machine Learning and as part of it, I am planning to learn R. I am also planning to see if I compete on some competitions in Kaggle. I might also start writing about more about Machine Learning this year. So stay tuned 🙂

Hardwarefun

Regarding hardware stuff, I am planning expand HardwareFun.com and write more posts there and also continue working on Arduino and start playing around with Raspberry Pi as well. So it is going to be pretty exciting.

From the looks of it, 2014 seems to be an exciting as well as a busy year and I am really looking forward to it.

So how was your 2013?

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Looking back at 2012

2012 had been a great year and it just ended. I thought of publishing my year end review for 2012 as I have done for the previous years.

Personal Highlights

If you have read my year end review of 2011, then you would have know that I got engaged in 2011 and I got married in 2012. Before marriage, pretty much everyone were saying that my life is going to change completely, but fortunately for me things haven’t changed much except that I have another person in my life who cares for me more than I care for myself 😉

Talking of marriage, I am very happy to know lot of people really liked my wedding invitation and recently a couple contacted me from Indonesia asking if they can use my wedding invitation design for their marriage.

Travel Highlights

Another thing which most people predicted for me is that after marriage I will not get much time to travel, which again proved to be wrong 😉 I continued my tradition of at least one international travel and a couple of domestic travel.

HardwareFun

2012 had been a great year for me from the hardware and robotics perspective. I continued working on hardware and Arduino related stuff which I picked up in 2010.

One of the important things regarding hardware that I did in 2012 is that I launched hardwarefun.com one of my pet projects that is close to me. I created hardwarefun.com to document my different adventures with hardware and also help other people who also want to learn hardware programming.

Talks and Workshops

Another thing which I improved in 2012 is my public speaking skills. I gave around 15 talks and also conducted my robotics workshop. The following are some of my favorite talks.

You can see the complete list of talks that I have given so far from my talks page.

Blog Stats

The following are stats generated for this blog by my Year End Stats WordPress Plugin.

Number of posts by year Number of comments by year Average length of posts by year Length of all posts by year

The number of posts have increased a bit and I am happy about that, since I am also writing posts in at hardwarefun as well.

I am planning to write more posts in 2013 and hope that with talks, workshop and personal life I get some free time to keep up this word 😉

What’s in for 2013?

So what’s in for 2013?

I am planning to concentrate more on my WordPress Plugins a bit and I already have some pretty good ideas. So stay tuned 😉

Regarding hardware stuff, I am planning expand HardwareFun.com and write more posts there and also continue working on Arduino and start playing around with Raspberry Pi as well. So it is going to be pretty exciting.

Regarding talks and workshop, I am planning to continue my robotics workshop (the next batch is going to be at the end of this month) and also start giving talks and workshops on other areas as well. Planning for a Hadoop and Pig workshop/talk soon.

From the looks of it, 2013 seems to be an exciting as well as a busy year and I am really looking forward to it.

So how was your 2012?

Posted in Random/Personal | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments