Hope you have a little patience, this blog entry is going to be pretty long. There was a multitude of conferences, more than a hundred pair coding sessions, more cities, hotels and other things as I criss crossed the country helping to knock out projects, code, fire off some open source projects and generally get some technology implemented. It has been a spectacular year. I also could add, it has thoroughly kicked my ass and I’ve loved it.
2012 Coding Projects
In 2012 I’ve taken the healm of the Iron Foundry Project which led to the creation of Tier 3 Web Fabric PaaS. A Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry .NET based PaaS. From there the project led to an expansion of leading the efforts on the Thor Project, which is a Cloud Foundry User Interface for OS-X and Windows 7. Beyond that I’ve contributed to and participated in dozens of different projects in various ways over the year. I finished up this year by joining Basho in December and thus, joined the Riak & related Basho Projects.
- Iron Foundry Organization &Iron Foundry Project
- Nuget vcap-client Library for .NET
- Thor Project for Cocoa & .NET for Windows 7
- Cloud Foundry Organization
- Basho Organization & Riak, Rebar, Docs & Other Projects
Coding Project Aims For 2013
Some of the projects I’ve started, will join or hope to otherwise continue participation in include the following. Here’s to hoping 2013 is a hard core coding and contributing year of excellence!
- Many of the Basho Organization’s Projects I’ll be diving into, including work around Rebar, Riak, Docs & a number of others.
- Name Factory – a project I’ve started a while back of Riak + JavaScript around creating massive test data with JavaScript and also using Riak for the storage & searching on that data created.
- Criollo – Criollo is one of the most common forms of cocoa, is a native OS-X Cocoa User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
- SpikeOp – This I’ve dubbed the name of the iOS interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
- I want to use and possibly contribute to Corrugated Iron, the .NET Client for Riak. Prospectively to use for a Windows 8 User Interface for distributed systems built on or using Riak.
- I’ll continue to maintain and provide support for the Iron Foundry vcap-client Library currently available via Nuget for .NET.
- Thor Project for Cocoa & Thor .NET for Cloud Foundry & Iron Foundry.
- Expand on prospective services for Cloud Foundry, either I or efforts I may lead to do this.
…there are others, but they’ll have to be figured out during the course of events. Also, there are an easy dozen other projects I’ll be working that don’t particularly have to do with coding, two are listed below. For an easy way to keep up with the projects I’m coding on, leading, participating in or otherwise hit me up on Twitter @adron or ADN @adron.
Big Project Aims for 2013
Thrashing Code Project – This is sort of, kind of secret. It’s going to happen soon, I have a personal schedule for it and I’ll be releasing information accordingly when the site and twitter account goes live.
Tour Triumvirate – I intend to plan, and hopefully will take at least 2 of the three tech tours I setup. More information will be forthcoming, but the original notion is outlined in the blog entry I wrote titled “The Adron Code Tour, Let’s Hack, Bike and Talk Hard Core Technology“.
Books I’ve Read in 2012
All of these I’ve either read or re-read in 2012. I set a goal at the beginning of last year to get my ass in gear when it comes to reading. A focused, get it read, understood and learn approach. I think I did pretty good overall. Not a book a week, but I’m getting back in gear. Considering my best year of reading was 100+ books, it might be a difficult to reach that again since I’m a working citizen, versus a child with plenty of time on their hands. But, it’s good to have goals. 😉
- The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
- The Rails 3 Way
- Eloquent Ruby
- The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, Selected Works of Frederic Bastiat
- The Myth of the Robber Barons
- Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?
- Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
- The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
- 8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT
- Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent
- Rework
- Steve Jobs
- Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming
- JavaScript: The Good Parts
- Node for Front-End Developers
- First Contact (In Her Name: The Last War, #1)
- Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing
- The REST API Design Handbook
- HTML5 Canvas
- HTML5: Up and Running
- Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
- Traffic
Book Reading Aims for 2013
- Natural Capitalism
- How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist
- Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
- Political Ideals
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
- Bikenomics: An Introduction to the Bicycle Economy
- Everyday Bicycling: How to Ride a Bike for Transportation (Whatever Your Lifestyle)
- Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike
- Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
- Erlang Programming
- Building Web Applications with Erlang: Working with REST and Web Sockets on Yaws
- Think Complexity: Complexity Science and Computational Modeling
- Async JavaScript
- Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere (Smashing Magazine Book Series)
- Windows PowerShell for Developers
- How to Use the Unix-Linux vi Text Editor
- Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook
- Designing Interfaces
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
- Consider Phlebas
- Snow Crash
- How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
- Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise
- Simply Complexity
- Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity)
- Thinking In Systems: A Primer
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Programming in Objective-C
- Learning iPad Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building iPad Apps with iOS 5
- Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
- Getting Started with GEO, CouchDB, and Node.js
- JavaScript Web Applications
- Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
- Design Patterns in Ruby
…and the two books I’d like to re-read this year because they’re just absurdly entertaining and I’d like a refresher of the stories.
- A Confederacy of Dunces (I’ll be reading this for the 2nd time)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Yup, just want to read it again)
My 2012 Coder’s Year in Photos
What I’ve put together here is a photo story of the year, hopefully it’s entertaining in some way. With that, here’s a review of the year, cheers and happy new year! 2012 started with one of my last hack sessions as a Seattle Resident at Ruby at Racer weekly meetup.
Meanwhile some of my last views from Russell Investments. Absolutely beautiful, epic and awe inspiring views of the Puget Sound from the Emerald City of Seattle.
Then a fitting image, from the business meeting floor of the same building, the settings sun for my departure.
February of 2012 kicked of with my return to Portland, Oregon. Stumptown regularly welcomed me back more than a few moments.
One of the first meetups I attended back in Portland was the DevOps Meetup.
That DevOps meetup just happened to have a session on one of the code bases I was working with, Cloud Foundry.
While my move consisted of many a couch, as I just couch surfed for the first 45 or so days I was back in Portland, I finally moved into a place at the Indigo in downtown.
The new system, albeit a great Christmas present from 2011, became the defacto work system of 2012 and remains one of my top machines. Mac Book Air w/ 4GB RAM, i5 Proc, 256 GB SSD. Not a bad machine.
A view from on high, looking down upon the streets of San Francisco from the New Relic Offices. Thanks for the invite and the visit, it was great meeting the great team at New Relic San Francisco!
Getting around on my first trip to San Francisco of 2012. Thanks to John, Bjorn, Bill, John and the whole team in Portland and San Francisco for the invite. Great talking to you guys.
On the same trip it began pouring rain as I’d never seen before in San Francisco. I sat by Duboche Park, staying warm and away from drowning! Arriving outside was one of the MUNIs that eventually I was rescued by from the torrential floods and returned to downtown, dry and intact!
…and Julia thanks for the tour around San Francisco and the extra tasty lunch at EAT!! Good times!
Amidst all these images, I threw together some into a collage. There are a number of awesome coders & hackers of all sorts in these images. Shout out to Jerry Sievert, Eric Sterling,
…and alas I’ll have another zillion images and such as we all roll into 2013 and onward. Cheers! For some more new years posts I’ve found useful check out this list, which I’ll be adding to over the next few days.