With 2014 over, I think it’s a good time to get introspective and spend time thinking about key developments that happened throughout the year. My main motivation for this post is to be able to look back a couple of years from now and remember how 2014 was for me.

Writing

2014 was finally a year where I’d like to think that I succeeded in blogging. Although I did fall short of my initial goal of one post per week I averaged around 3 posts a month which, for someone who’s failed regularly at blogging, is a great success.

I think my decision to just go with an existing theme and not spend any time modifying the look made it click. I’m no stranger to falling down the rabbit hole of endlessly tweaking your blog. I’m glad I took that decision!

Open Source

2014 was a good year for me on Github. It started with Postman Interceptor and was followed by 3 months of work on Newman. Thanks to Postman, I also earned a 64 day long commit streak on Github.

Github Contributions Chart 2014

The best part of year, however, was the last month during which a curated list of CS courses I made grew insanely popular (earning 1500 stars in a single day)! I also feel a bit sheepish to mention that it helped me tick two items off my bucket list - being on Github’s trending page and having a personal project submitted by someone else on HN.

New Tech

I experimented with few new frameworks and programming languages this year. On the Javascript side, I got a chance early on to use Angular at my workplace where we rebuilt the entire checkout functionality. My work on Postman also introduced me to Node.js where my experience was earlier restricted to “Hello World”. To get out of my comfort zone of web development, I set aside time for learning Android and built my first mobile app this year.

On the programming languages front, my focus this year was experimenting more with functional programming languages. I spent around a month with OCaml while working through a course. Unfortunately, I was not able to come up with a useful project where I could use it, so my knowledge in OCaml languished.

I also spent a few weeks with Rust which happened when I was quite burnt out from work and desperately wanted a change. Playing with Rust was more fruitful as I was able to send a few Pull requests to a popular rust project. Rust overall seems fantastic and I’m planning to spend more time as it hits 1.0 early 2015.

Courses

This year I finished one course, Mining Massive DataSets - a two month long Data Mining course on Coursera. For the ones interested, my review can be read here. On the lighter side, I also audited a course on Nutrition and spent a few weekends through Ilya Grigorik’s course on Web Performance.

Personal

Personally, 2014 was a mixed bag. Although I made some really good friends this year, my personal relationships suffered. Due to the lack of exercise during the second half of the year my health also deteriorated. Hopefully, 2015 will be the year where I figure out on how to make exercise a way of life.

Plans for 2015

  • Learn a lisp
  • Do a project in Rust
  • Do a ML / Data Mining project
  • Get more active

Onward to 2015!