I’ve been blogging over at ef.gy on and off for a while, but it never felt quite right, and I’ve been wanting to have my own space for quite a while. So I thought I’d give Github Pages a spin, and after fiddling around with jekyll for a while here I am.

Since it’s New Year’s Eve, why not do a “year in review” type post to get going?

Work

I started working at a startup as a software engineer in January. This is my first full-time professional job, and it’s been both interesting and scary. I took the job to get into machine learning, and ended up doing some of that, but also worked on our internal API, handled most of the database administration, and in addition to that, I ended up helping our new front-end developer to get the hang of the code base, and doing a lot of front-end work myself. Said front-end developer left in September because of visa issues that forced him and his partner to move abroad. So… the company being an actually small startup to begin with (as in we have a single-digit number of people, not the type of “small startup” that has like 100 employees), I’m currently the only software engineer there. Which is scary to say the least, and I’m concerned that I don’t really have the time to specialise and develop expertise in any one thing, because I have to do quite a few different things. I’ll figure it out in 2016, I hope.

Coding

Like I said, I learned Javascript, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time for pet projects. I wrapped up a game I’d started at a hackathon and put it online (beware, it’s buggy), and I started another project that didn’t get very far, but that was about it. Oh, and at CCC this year I started a little project to work on during breaks, whose output you can see here (code is on my Github, and yes, I couldn’t be bothered picking a project name for this silly thing and just used the one Github suggested). It’s a Twitter bot that matches random quotes from copyright-free literature with more-or-less fitting animal pictures. It’s not done, and not very sophisticated, but on the last day of CCC I got to the point where I have a cronjob that automatically tweets once a day, so I’m rather pleased with the outcome so far - working in a startup taught my perfectionist self a lot about the value of “good enough”. I’m going to work on it some more because I want to use it as a playground for topic analysis.

Media

I went on a bit of a Discworld binge this year since I was traveling a lot and Discworld books are light enough reading that I can read them on a plane without getting a headache, but you never feel like you’re losing IQ points from reading this book. I read Kate Mulgrew’s autobiography, Born With Teeth, and I can only recommend it. Kate Mulgrew and Captain Janeway are two of my role models. A chilling and slightly scary read was Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill, which has been described as “Mean Girls meets The Handmaid’s Tale”, and that is a perfect description. I read Octavia Butler’s Patternist series, which I enjoyed even though it took me a while to get into. I probably read a lot more books, but those were the most recent and/or most memorable ones.

I caught a few new shows on Netflix that I greatly enjoyed - The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Master of None, and Jessica Jones, which I haven’t finished watching because while I think it’s a great show it also is very dark and depressing, so as an act of self care I’m delaying the second half of the season until spring. In summer we saw Mad Max: Fury Road, and oh my goodness I would not describe myself as a Mad Max person usually, but that movie is amazing, and I am so glad I saw it on the big screen. Furiosa and the other women are all completely badass. There is a person with a giant electric guitar that spits fire. That, and the new Star Wars, are actually the only two new movies I saw this year.

Other than that, I discovered the Nerdette podcast, which is a podcast by two nerdy women that interview an awesome nerdy woman most every episode. The Talk Python to me podcast is also pretty good, as is Startup by Gimlet Media (a startup podcast by a podcast startup! The first season is about their own company, the second one is about a dating company started by two women). And I’m late to the party but I started listening to Welcome to Night Vale which is creepy and amazing, although I dare not say more in case the Sheriff’s secret police read this blog.

Conferences

I’ve only been to two this year: PyCon Ireland, where I volunteered as a staff member, and the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg which ended yesterday. PyCon Ireland was pretty good - I missed a lot of the talks I wanted to see because I was working registration, but I got to see a lot of great talks on the second day.
The other conference was CCC, which was the same as every year: amazing and a bit overwhelming. I’m still suffering from post-Congress blues (and can’t even watch the streams because of shitty hotel internet), and I already want to go back next year.

Speaking

I gave my first technical talk this year, at our Python Ireland user group! I talked about rq, a task queuing Python library backed by Redis that we use at work. It was a really good experience, and I want to speak more in the future, maybe even at an actual conference.

Plans for 2016

As usual I have too many things I want to do and too little time to do them in, but one of the things I want to do more of next year is putting myself out there a bit more. I’m a shy introvert, and a perfectionist, which doesn’t help, but at the end of the day, it helps no one to hide my light under a bushel. So I am going to do more stuff, and I’m going to blog about it and speak at conferences, of which I plan on going to a few next year - PyCaribbean, PyCon Ireland and probably CCC again. There is also some family stuff going on - people are getting married and having babies -, so I’ll be traveling quite a bit. Should be an interesting year!