Friday, January 01, 2016

This was 2015 and plenty to do in 2016!

2015 was an amazing year, learning a lot and making some progress in my Open Source development and climbing activities.
Buildtime Trend keeps growing, with Angular and a Facebook Open Sourced project as new users, improving my Python and JavaScript skills, setting up a CherryPy based service on Heroku, backed by a Celery/RabbitMQ task queue to make the service more responsive.

I have no real resolutions for 2016, I'll just spend my time on climbing and Open Source software development, learning new skills along the way and putting them into practice :

  • use Ansible (or another configuration management tool) to provision a Vagrant based development environment for Buildtime Trend
  • start using Django to add user management to Buildtime Trend as a Service
  • learn how to climb safely in less equiped areas using friends, nuts, and other mobile protection
  • apply the lessons learned form "The Rock Warrior's Way' while climbing
  • visit a few conferences : FOSDEM, 33C3 and Newline, and maybe some more : LinuxTag, DebConf, FossAsia, KeenCon, ...
  • do some improvements to my house

Plenty to do in 2016! I wish anyone an joyful year full of insights and opportunities to learn and improve.
And remember, it's all about enjoying the journey!


Here are some highlights from 2015 :
  • Celebrated New Year in Lisbon.
  • Reached a 365 day commit streak contributing to Open Source projects, with 2300+ commits over that period.
  • visited FOSDEM 2015, another great weekend of Open Source enthousiast meeting and sharing knowledge in Brussels, with over 500 speakers and 5-10.000 visitors. Happy to meet Eduard and Ecaterina again who came over from Romania, and many others.
  • Buildtime Trend was mentioned in the Black Duck newsletter 
  • Buildtime Trend made it to the top 3 of hot projects on OpenHub
  • Reached the most active developers top 10 on OpenHub
  • Released Buildtime Trend v0.2 and launched a Heroku app hosting the service.
  • Visited Cork and Dublin with Sofie, attending Jeroen's PhD graduation ceremony and meeting Rouslan and his friends.
  • Attended Newline 0x05 and did two talks : Buildtime Trend : Visualise what's trending in your build process and What I learned from 365 days of contributing to Open Source projects
  • Ended my commit streak after 452 days
  • Went on a climbing trip to Gorges du Tarn
  • Flashed my first 6a lead climbing on rock.
  • Traveled to the US, East coast this time, visiting Washington DC, meeting Lieven H and Wim, exploring New York City with Tine, Lukas and Marie-Hélène.
  • One-day climbing trip to Freyr with Peter.
  • And another climbing trip to Beez with Lieven V, Ben, Patrick and others.
  • 4th blood donation, convinced Tine to join me for her first donation! Well done!
  • Deployed a Celery/RabbitMQ based worker to Buildtime Trend as a Service on Heroku, taking some load off the webservice and improving the response times.
  • Climbing trip to La Bérarde, with Bleau, doing my first multipitches (Li Maye laya and Pin Thotal) with Mariska and lead climbing a few 6a+ routes. Weather was great, atmosphere was superb, climbing was fun!
  • Went to Fontainebleau for the birtdayparty of Andreas. Great fun, nice people, lots of routes. Finished my first red route in Fontainebleau.
  • Travelled to California and made roadtrip from San-Francisco, to Yosemite, over Tioga Pass to Mojave Dessert, Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and flying back from Phoenix to San-Francisco. I did some climbing and hiking, took a climbing course on using cams and nuts. On the way I met a lot of nice people, with whom I had interesting conversations.
  • Released Buildtime Trend v0.3
  • Finished online Stanford University course Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1
  • Read The Rock Warrior's Way, a must read for any climber
  • Visited 32C3 in Hamburg, 4 days of lectures, writing software and talking to other developers. It was amazing, next year again!