Looking Back on 2013

2013 was a good year for me in many aspects. I’ll share here some of the programming-related achievements of mine over the year that made me somewhat proud of myself.

Achievements

Ruby

RuboCop

I’ve made great headway with the RuboCop static code analyzer over the year. Working on a big non-Rails Ruby project reminded me why I fell in love with Ruby in the first place. I was also amazed by great community that quickly formed around RuboCop and propelled it to popularity. I hope that in 2014 I’ll be able to deliver a 1.0 release.

Blogging

I finally did some Ruby-related blogging this year - mostly regarding good programming style. I enjoyed it, although I noticed it’s much harder for me to blog, than it is to code. Good thing I became a programmer and not a writer I guess!

Emacs

I spent a lot of time working on Emacs-related stuff over the year:

• I started a new Emacs blog called Emacs Redux
• I improved a lot Prelude and Projectile
• I contributed code to Emacs for the first time
• I took over the maintenance of CIDER
• I was involved in a lesser role in the development of many cool Emacs extensions

Clojure

I wrote a Clojure Style Guide at the beginning of the year. I also hoped I’d be able to work on static code analyzer for Clojure similar to RuboCop, but I got sidetracked and this did not happen. I did lots of CIDER-related work over the year and I hope I’ll be able improve CIDER significantly in 2014 (I have so many great ideas about it!).

Clojure is still my favorite programming language and hope in 2014 I’ll be able to work on more Clojure projects.

Misc

I spent some time playing with algorithms and math for the first time in a long while (inspired by Coursera). This was lots of fun! I hope that in 2014 I’ll be able to allocate even more time to studying them properly.

Epilogue

In previous years I generally spent a lot of time studying/researching new programming related stuff - new languages, new frameworks, new tools, new paradigms, etc. Conversely, I spent relatively little time hacking on open-source projects. 2013 was quite different for me - very little research, lots of open-source hacking. It was pretty tiresome at times, but also extremely enjoyable and gratifying experience.

No idea how 2014 will turn out, but I hope it will be at least as fun as 2013 was!