A month into 2016, I think it's a good think to reflect. I actually followed through and completed my first pet project, a Wordpress plugin. I have also lived together with my wife for a complete month now, and it's going great so far (just married).
Congratulations!<p>I recently launched my first ever startup. It's a server hosting company much like DigitalOcean but instead of paying $10 dollars for a 1GB server, you get the ability to create multiple 1GB servers (2, 12, or 32) for less than half the price you would pay if you bought them individually.<p>It's mostly targeted at businesses who need to spin up a lot of fast servers for their employees and don't want to spend so much money -- but individuals could also take advantage of this.<p>[0]: <a href="https://ramgrid.com" rel="nofollow">https://ramgrid.com</a>
I just "finished" writing my interactive tutorial on server configuration/deployment with Saltstack: <a href="https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/" rel="nofollow">https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch/</a><p>As someone who struggled a lot with writing anxiety in school, I just feel really good about having gotten this out the door. I also feel like I've learned a bunch about how to push past writing anxiety.<p>I put "finished" in quotes because I still feel like I have a lot that I want to add and improve:<p>- I approached this project as a UI design and I feel like I want to do a lot more user testing, especially for folks on Windows or who have poor connections.<p>- I wrote a line-by-line comments system so that folks could let me know which parts didn't make sense. I want to improve that and turn it into a plugin so that other projects could use it.<p>- I have some integration tests for some of the parts that I feel like need to be written.<p>- There are a few trade-offs I made that I suspect I should go back and make the other choice.<p>- I currently have students only deploy to DigitalOcean. I want to have instructions on how to deploy to AWS, Azure, and a bunch of other services.<p>But for now, I'm just really happy having gotten this up there. If you have feedback, please let me know.
Took our service, a geocoding API for the world based on various open geocoders, out of beta: <a href="https://geocoder.opencagedata.com" rel="nofollow">https://geocoder.opencagedata.com</a>
All feedback, positive or negative, very welcome.
Congrats on getting married! Care to share the plugin?<p>From Jan 1 to today we tuned our site and put in a lot of grunt work to grow daily organic traffic by 2x, daily uniques on the site by 3x, and average session time by about 20%. Also launched a few really interesting feature experiments that I can't share yet but we're hoping will end up making buying a home significantly less expensive. This week I've been learning about WKWebViews [0] and using them to retool our iOS app detail views to have feature parity with our web app. Work is still fun!<p>[0]: <a href="http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/" rel="nofollow">http://nshipster.com/wkwebkit/</a>
Started dieting near the end of the month <i>and</i> managed to stick to it (3kgs down so far). Will take me about two months to reach my target, but I'm right on track :)<p>Learnt to read/write around 250 Chinese characters. It was much easier than I thought it would be and quite fun. Walking around Chinatown is a whole different experience, even with the tiny fraction of characters that I know.<p>Not much on the techie side accomplished this month, but lots of little things started. Looking forward to some results in February.<p>Congratulations on the marriage :D
I started education for the first time in too long. This involves leaving the house and talking to people, so it's challenging, but in a good way.<p>EDIT: Congrats on the marriage!
I would not call it an achievement, per se, but my repository Timelined(<a href="https://github.com/andriussev/timelined" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andriussev/timelined</a>) gained over 400 stars. Haven't really had a repository that had stars before.<p>I have yet to determine how I become a multi-billionaire from this <i>achievement</i> :)
Congratulation on getting married,<p>I have started a 3 days book challenge where i finish a book every 3 days, it's going great so far, also I am refreshing my skills with online education (although I am still following MS degree in Robotics and AI), but still the world is broader than only this, and I programmed few robots and made few contributions to the OSS (talking about ROS here).
I made a combined CI and staging system for web app front ends based on Docker Compose, Git, bash, Node, and React, over a weekend.<p>I came up with a way of writing front end browser tests that works very well for us. It's based on React simulated events and a test runner that parses English Markdown for general steps, aided by simple data attribute markup that specifies semantic roles for elements. Plus a nice little React HUD for running tests in your browser while developing.<p>I also joined some friends to play in a band, moved to Stockholm, scheduled a date for this weekend, and mostly replaced coffee with tea.<p>Next up is an exercise habit...
I built a really basic genome analysis pipeline. It's a super hacked together tool with the hopes of helping doctors make more data driven decisions on diagnosing patients based on empirical data: the individuals genome. I got a very basic version working that allows a doctor to search for a specific term (eg. ADHD) and see if the patient has any genetic mutations based on genes typically associated with that disease.<p>Super straw man, not clinically proven, and hacked together - but fun and learned a ton! Built on Redshift with a small R script and a ton of manual data ETL.
1. Started doing intermittent fasting. Of all the fat loss things I've tried, this has been the easiest to stick to. Will post about my experience in a couple of weeks.<p>2. Started running regularly - 3 days per week. If anyone is looking to get into running I can't recommend the NHS Couch to 5k plan enough.<p>3. Launched the private beta for my new online learning marketplace - <a href="http://learnetto.com" rel="nofollow">http://learnetto.com</a> and got featured on Betalist.<p>Pretty excited about February!
After 1 year and 14 days I finally released my (Nth) product. Here's a review/article/video about it <a href="http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot/" rel="nofollow">http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/01/22/snapper-2-screenshot...</a><p>It's kind of 'niche' in who can use it, but I've got quite a lot of dedicated users.
Rolled out a huge update to Snail Rush (<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspace.snailracer" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iitianspac...</a>) a quiz game that we at Eduisfun made. It now has tons of different topics to try out since not everyone is into Mathematics.
I finally got over the hump with my BrainRunner and BrainHub apps (companion apps for my SnailLife snail simulation). The BrainHub manages queueing brain checks of living snails in the world and distributing them to free BrainRunners. This way I can have an unlimited number of BrainRunners (well, limited by my budget) running brain checks in parallel completely separately from the user facing app.
I have read Cal's Newport new book about Deep Work (<a href="http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/" rel="nofollow">http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/</a>) and have been trying to adapt some of the strategies from it. So far I see positive results (less time spent working, but more done), even though I'm not doing very well.<p>EDIT: Congrats ;-)
Congrats on the marriage!<p>During the first month we'd released a second alpha of our project that allows to build real-time data processing/visualisation pipelines in the browser. And now we're on track to allow building those pipelines using natural language input (target is to create a pipeline from someone saying, e.g. "what people on twitter think about brand X?")
- Lost 4 kilos;<p>- Read 3 books;<p>- Studied a lot of math (according to rescue time, something like 100 hours in Khan Academy); and<p>- Finished a 45 hours/class discipline in Collge (did an intense program for that).
- Changed the company I work for<p>- Also built some Wordpress and Magento plugins<p>- Took on some freelance clients for advertising and have ramped up their spend, and profits, incredibly<p>- Joined Dataquest.io in a consultancy capacity