Hey, so where did 2014 go, amirite guys? Amirite??

2014 in bulleted list form:

• Most stressful year of my life (and that includes the years I both worked full time and went to school full time), but not bad: high peaks and low valleys even out to a good year, but turbulent. Not just high and low events contributing to stress, also much stress has been ambient from ongoing and difficult events, but much of it not really befitting describing on this blog.

• MediaGoblin campaign went well, but I am tired of doing crowdfunding campaigns. Probably the last I will ever run... or at least the last for a long while. Nearly 5 months from start to wrapup of 60 hour high-stress weeks. But again, it went well! And hey, that video came out pretty great.

• Hiring Jessica was the smartest move we could have made, and I'm glad we made it.

• MediaGoblin federation work is going well; next release should make that clearer I hope.

• Both Jessica and I are on the W3C Social Working Group trying to standardize federation, and I'm excited about that.

• Hiring Jessica is great, but what to do about my own income? Happy to say I've started contracting for Open Tech Strategies who are great. Working under Karl Fogel is wonderful, and so is contracting for an org that mandates all code written there be free software. Plus, contracting 10 hours a week means I have plenty of other (including MediaGoblin) time left over.

• Also it's great to have a boss again who is reviewing my performance and seems happy with my work, especially when that boss is almost certainly more technically capable than I am; I forgot how much external affirmation from that is helpful in probably some base human way. I had some great bosses in the not too distant past, and while I think I'm a pretty decent boss to others, Morgan has pointed out that I am a really mean boss to myself.

• Despite ambient stress for both of us, Morgan and I's relationship goes well, maybe this year better than ever.

• Got nerdier, started playing tabletop role playing games with friends a lot. Board games too.

• Living in Madison is good.

• We are currently caring for a dog since another family member can't keep her where she is staying. Aside from temporary dog-sitting, I've never lived somewhere with a dog that I am caring for... it's interesting.

• The first half of the year was crazy due to the MediaGoblin campaign (again, I think it went great, and I had lots of help from great friends, just stressful), the second half crazy due to... well, a pile of things that are too personal for a blog (yeah I know I already said that). But everything came to a head right at the end of the year. This year burnt me the hell out.

• This made me pretty useless in December, and makes me feel terrible because I pushed vocally for a MediaGoblin release and failed to hold up my end of things to make it happen. I need to get back on track. This will happen, but in the meanwhile, I feel shitty.

• Burnout recovery has been productive; an odd thing to say maybe, but I seem to be getting a lot done, but not always on the things I think I should be.

• I feel more confident in myself as a programmer than before... I've always felt a large amount of impostor syndrome because I don't really have a computer science degree... I'm a community trained hacker (not to knock that, but it's hard to not feel insecure because of it).

  But this year I did some cool things, including getting patches in to a fun language, and I worked on an actor model system that I think has a hell of a lot of promise if I could just get the damned time for it. (If only I had time to solve error propagation and the inter-hive-communication demos...) I did every exercise in The Little Schemer (a real joy to work through) and I feel like hey, I finally understand how to write code recursively in a way that feels natural. And it turns out there is a MELPA-installable texinfo version of SICP and I've been slowly working my way through it when I'm too tired to do anything else but want to pretend to be productive (which has been a lot of the last month). Still so much to learn though, but I appreciate the bottomless well aspect of programming.

• Aside from the MediaGoblin campaign video, not a lot of artwork done this year. Hrm.

• A couple of friends this year have made the "I've been doing nothing but python webdev for years and I need to mix it up" and to those friends: I hear you. Maybe hence the above?

• Aside from MediaGoblin I've been doing a lot more chipping away at tiny bits of some free software projects, but maybe nothing significant enough to blog about yet, but there's a deployment system in there and a game thing and some other stuff. Nothing MediaGoblin sized, though. (Whew!)

• Enjoying learning functional reactive programming (and expanding my understanding of Scheme) with Sly. Unfortunately still under-documented, but it's getting better, and davexunit is answering lots of questions for me. I might write a tutorial, or tutorials, soon.

• Another ascii art logo for a FOSS project I made got vectorized and made way better than my original version, but that deserves its own post.

• I continue to be able to work on free software full time, which is great.

I feel like the start of 2015 has already been moving upward, and has been much less stressful than the end of 2014. I hope that curve can keep moving up. And I hope I can keep up what I feel, despite me nearly going insane from various facets of it, is a fairly productive life.