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.
 
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?