In 2010? I reworked my Comet-based realtime game-in-a-web-server library, RailsGame.
I fully rewrote, updated and released a webapp called WantMyJob.com.
I wrote a circuit simulator game called Shanna's Pizza to start teaching my two-year-old the basics of programming. I also started doing Snap Circuits with her so she'd have a physical basis to understand the circuit simulator game. Also, had a second kid.
I wrote a Rails 3 tutorial, including an app with logins and nested resources, called RefactorIt!
I finally put together a real programming portfolio, on the web and everything (angelbob.com/portfolio).
I read up on Bayesian Statistics and Data Analysis (thanks, O'Reilly!).
I blogged and blogged and blogged.
I reworked, resurrected and took screen shots of a scary amount of my old work, partly for the portfolio. This sort of blurs with converting my old Rails stuff to Rails 3, but I did some of both.
I continued to work on my day job, of course. And gave a JRuby presentation for Engine Yard based on what we do there.
Did you know you get more done if you write it down somewhere (like a blog and portfolio) and tell people about it? True story.
Did you know you get more done if you write it down somewhere (like a blog and portfolio) and tell people about it? True story.
Do you find that? I'm the opposite, once I "announce" something all desire and motivation for completion goes out of the window. For me I think it's about the appreciation, so when I explain the idea and love it, why complete it.
It varies for me. Sometimes it's just an idea and I want to share it. Maybe I'll never do it, maybe I want to get feedback on it. Some pretty cool stuff came out of just "What-If" like Mongrel2 and Librelist.
Other times I get infected with an idea and have to crank out a prototype to see if it'd work. When I'm done, I still try to throw it up there and see what people think. Usually the process of writing about it actually helps me work out if it's worth it or not as well.
Indeed writing and interacting about something levels you up. I'm not (yet) a blogger but recently I have started interacting on a few social coding networks (stackoverflow, github, HN) and I feel more productive.
PS. Is RailsGame open source ? It looks interesting!
I wrote a rant about how much I hate people that kick back and put their feet up on the table.
Oh, nope, that was Zed, too!
(But seriously, Mongrel 2 is an amazing work of software engineering. In addition to being a good web server, it's also a good example of how nice C is if you forget how they did it in the 70s and write it like it's 2010.)
Wrote my own web server. Which runs my own web framework. Which runs my new webapp a friend and I wrote yesterday. Writing a simple web stack isn't hard. Writing a full featured, secure, and reliable stack is more difficult.
I mean we are mostly all people who make stuff here. I am slightly offended by your attitude that ZS is some how showing us up and we need to prove what we did this year.
Launched wildlifenearyou.com, built a new commenting system for guardian.co.uk (with a great team), ran a marathon, got married, went on a six month honeymoon through France, Spain, Morocco and Egypt, co-founded and launched lanyrd.com with my wife (from an apartment in Casablanca), learnt to scuba dive, and we're now on a self-drive safari in South Africa. 2010 has been /awesome/.
Hey, I understand the guardian comment system uses Pluck and we're looking to integrate pluck ourselves at the ABC in Australia. I don't suppose I could pick your brains for any kind of implementation tricks and information you can provide can I?
You say "got married" = hosted a fantastic wedding, complete with huge conga lines, traditional Jewish chair dance, a wedding "cake" of cheese, otters, owls, eagles, and more!
Since we're all bragging, I finished my MSCS at Stanford with over a 4.0 GPA, wrote a game that was a finalist in the CS248 competition, had my first paper published, TAed CS210, launched my startup, learned Django and CoffeeScript and JavaScript, wrote a charting library in CS/Raphael, started learning how to be someone's boss, and moved across the country and forced myself to make friends. All in all I feel good about the year.
Over a 4.0 GPA? Man, are grades that badly inflated now that they have to add extra points to the GPA to make people seem better? No knock on you at all, but just curious what the scale is.
At my uni (University of Montreal), A was worth 4.0 and A+ was worth 4.3. I don't think it comes from grade inflation, though. Just a different convention.
Well, an A+ is worth 4.3, so if you're some kind of superhuman I suppose you could get a 4.3 overall, though it's not really practical when you're taking 3 classes a quarter and being a TA or RA. I managed to get three of those, and honestly I think I earned them - I worked extremely hard throughout my MS and that occasionally resulted in very strong results. There are some classes with inflation-compatible grading schemes (Pat Hanrahan's 148 comes to mind, in which, when I took it, 7/8 projects offered 25% extra credit each, and each project was 10% of one's grade, meaning the maximum grade for the course was 117.5%...though I didn't get an A+ in that course, since I didn't do well on the exams), but they're the minority.
The problem is, without knowing the cap on "bonus points," I can't know how far under 4.0 your GPA might have been without the bonus. Maybe your GPA was "only" a 3.7 before adding 1 bonus point? It's ambiguous at best, deceptive at worst.
On the other hand, if a school doesn't give extra points for more advanced classes, someone who took the hardest curriculum possible and did pretty well might have a lower GPA than someone who took the easiest curriculum possible.
* Kicked out more bad guys out of compromised networks than usual.
* Grew my main business, had our first year where I've not had a single worry about running out of money (touch wood) in the middle of a serious recession.
* Started building academic and vendor relationships (never thought I'd do that) to develop new technologies and services.
* Did more vulnerability research this year than I have in the last two but haven't published anything public yet.
* Moved to Sales, Marketing, now back to Technical for the time being.
* Took on a business partner and mentor
* Bid for two research grants
* Built up pipeline, wrote more proposals than I have in a long time.
* Seriously damaged my knee in a freak dancing accident.
* Grew a Mo to support Prostate Cancer charities (and raised a few bob too)
* Started a proper non-security side project (http://www.minklinks.com/) - failed to get it into beta for HN November but it will be out before year end.
* Did a whole load of pentesting.
That's it so far, still more things to come before year end though. Hope I pull them off.
* I'm still helping out Python newcomers on Pylons, Tornado, and recently Flask mailing list.
* I fix bugs on a couple of gems.
* I start blogging again.
* I start learning http://keplerproject.github.com/orbit not too long ago after answering my own question "I wish there's a hybrid between ruby+python and faster than both."
Well, I made a new cloud computing platform using my new federated REST database and my new message queue and my new Subversion sharding layer and my new unit testing library, all in a language I didn't know when I started. Then I made a web site and management console for it that runs on it. And a network API and a command-line tool because you need those.
Comments
So in 2010 Zed has written his own web server which runs his new framework he wrote for the new webapp he wrote.
What did you do this year?
In 2010? I reworked my Comet-based realtime game-in-a-web-server library, RailsGame.
I fully rewrote, updated and released a webapp called WantMyJob.com.
I wrote a circuit simulator game called Shanna's Pizza to start teaching my two-year-old the basics of programming. I also started doing Snap Circuits with her so she'd have a physical basis to understand the circuit simulator game. Also, had a second kid.
I wrote a Rails 3 tutorial, including an app with logins and nested resources, called RefactorIt!
I finally put together a real programming portfolio, on the web and everything (angelbob.com/portfolio).
I read up on Bayesian Statistics and Data Analysis (thanks, O'Reilly!).
I blogged and blogged and blogged.
I reworked, resurrected and took screen shots of a scary amount of my old work, partly for the portfolio. This sort of blurs with converting my old Rails stuff to Rails 3, but I did some of both.
I continued to work on my day job, of course. And gave a JRuby presentation for Engine Yard based on what we do there.
Did you know you get more done if you write it down somewhere (like a blog and portfolio) and tell people about it? True story.
That's probably part of Zed's trick, too.
Don't forget "answered a rhetorical question".
That's pretty cool stuff man. I like people who go out of their way to do as much diverse stuff as they can.
Did you know you get more done if you write it down somewhere (like a blog and portfolio) and tell people about it? True story.
Do you find that? I'm the opposite, once I "announce" something all desire and motivation for completion goes out of the window. For me I think it's about the appreciation, so when I explain the idea and love it, why complete it.
It varies for me. Sometimes it's just an idea and I want to share it. Maybe I'll never do it, maybe I want to get feedback on it. Some pretty cool stuff came out of just "What-If" like Mongrel2 and Librelist.
Other times I get infected with an idea and have to crank out a prototype to see if it'd work. When I'm done, I still try to throw it up there and see what people think. Usually the process of writing about it actually helps me work out if it's worth it or not as well.
Don't get addicted to Brain Crack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24prm3XjVgk
I build first, then announce :-)
Indeed writing and interacting about something levels you up. I'm not (yet) a blogger but recently I have started interacting on a few social coding networks (stackoverflow, github, HN) and I feel more productive.
PS. Is RailsGame open source ? It looks interesting!
nvm, found it on your github account https://github.com/noahgibbs/RailsGame
I wrote a rant about how much I hate people that kick back and put their feet up on the table.
Oh, nope, that was Zed, too!
(But seriously, Mongrel 2 is an amazing work of software engineering. In addition to being a good web server, it's also a good example of how nice C is if you forget how they did it in the 70s and write it like it's 2010.)
They did Unix in the 70s; C was pretty nice then too.
Oh yeah, it was great! Instead of "su", you just ran finger with a really long command-line.
Yep, 'cause pointing your nasty dogs at someone is just low class. (ha)
Wrote my own web server. Which runs my own web framework. Which runs my new webapp a friend and I wrote yesterday. Writing a simple web stack isn't hard. Writing a full featured, secure, and reliable stack is more difficult.
I mean we are mostly all people who make stuff here. I am slightly offended by your attitude that ZS is some how showing us up and we need to prove what we did this year.
Agree. Anyone can write a webserver in a day. It's all the extra crap that takes a while to get just right.
The hero worship really puts me off checking HN.
Launched wildlifenearyou.com, built a new commenting system for guardian.co.uk (with a great team), ran a marathon, got married, went on a six month honeymoon through France, Spain, Morocco and Egypt, co-founded and launched lanyrd.com with my wife (from an apartment in Casablanca), learnt to scuba dive, and we're now on a self-drive safari in South Africa. 2010 has been /awesome/.
Hey, I understand the guardian comment system uses Pluck and we're looking to integrate pluck ourselves at the ABC in Australia. I don't suppose I could pick your brains for any kind of implementation tricks and information you can provide can I?
You say "got married" = hosted a fantastic wedding, complete with huge conga lines, traditional Jewish chair dance, a wedding "cake" of cheese, otters, owls, eagles, and more!
Want to grab a beer?
don't forget writing a book on python
And a great one at that.
Since we're all bragging, I finished my MSCS at Stanford with over a 4.0 GPA, wrote a game that was a finalist in the CS248 competition, had my first paper published, TAed CS210, launched my startup, learned Django and CoffeeScript and JavaScript, wrote a charting library in CS/Raphael, started learning how to be someone's boss, and moved across the country and forced myself to make friends. All in all I feel good about the year.
Over a 4.0 GPA? Man, are grades that badly inflated now that they have to add extra points to the GPA to make people seem better? No knock on you at all, but just curious what the scale is.
At my uni (University of Montreal), A was worth 4.0 and A+ was worth 4.3. I don't think it comes from grade inflation, though. Just a different convention.
According to Wikipedia, the 4.0 scale is anything but standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_(education)
Well, an A+ is worth 4.3, so if you're some kind of superhuman I suppose you could get a 4.3 overall, though it's not really practical when you're taking 3 classes a quarter and being a TA or RA. I managed to get three of those, and honestly I think I earned them - I worked extremely hard throughout my MS and that occasionally resulted in very strong results. There are some classes with inflation-compatible grading schemes (Pat Hanrahan's 148 comes to mind, in which, when I took it, 7/8 projects offered 25% extra credit each, and each project was 10% of one's grade, meaning the maximum grade for the course was 117.5%...though I didn't get an A+ in that course, since I didn't do well on the exams), but they're the minority.
I graduated my high school with a 4.7. They add in the 'bonus points' for taking AP and honors classes after the division, not before.
Oh, and everyone over a 4.0 was reported as valedictorian.
The problem is, without knowing the cap on "bonus points," I can't know how far under 4.0 your GPA might have been without the bonus. Maybe your GPA was "only" a 3.7 before adding 1 bonus point? It's ambiguous at best, deceptive at worst.
On the other hand, if a school doesn't give extra points for more advanced classes, someone who took the hardest curriculum possible and did pretty well might have a lower GPA than someone who took the easiest curriculum possible.
This happened to one of my friends.
It was possible to get a 4.9. I don't remember exactly what I got, but it was mostly As, a few Bs.
They've since decreased the 'bonus' quite a lot.
We weren't all bragging
* Kicked out more bad guys out of compromised networks than usual.
* Grew my main business, had our first year where I've not had a single worry about running out of money (touch wood) in the middle of a serious recession.
* Started building academic and vendor relationships (never thought I'd do that) to develop new technologies and services.
* Did more vulnerability research this year than I have in the last two but haven't published anything public yet.
* Moved to Sales, Marketing, now back to Technical for the time being.
* Took on a business partner and mentor
* Bid for two research grants
* Built up pipeline, wrote more proposals than I have in a long time.
* Seriously damaged my knee in a freak dancing accident.
* Grew a Mo to support Prostate Cancer charities (and raised a few bob too)
* Started a proper non-security side project (http://www.minklinks.com/) - failed to get it into beta for HN November but it will be out before year end.
* Did a whole load of pentesting.
That's it so far, still more things to come before year end though. Hope I pull them off.
Let's see,
* I quit my full time job, start doing contracting again.
* I co-founded http://cooln.es to test our theory about points relationships between social sites.
* I founded http://mybucket.co because all other bookmarking apps are too much work.
* manual classification of news is too much work, so I created Bayesian filter on top of Redis. It's open source: https://github.com/didip/bayes_on_redis
* I'm still helping out Python newcomers on Pylons, Tornado, and recently Flask mailing list.
* I fix bugs on a couple of gems.
* I start blogging again.
* I start learning http://keplerproject.github.com/orbit not too long ago after answering my own question "I wish there's a hybrid between ruby+python and faster than both."
I'd say it hasn't been a bad year.
Well, I made a new cloud computing platform using my new federated REST database and my new message queue and my new Subversion sharding layer and my new unit testing library, all in a language I didn't know when I started. Then I made a web site and management console for it that runs on it. And a network API and a command-line tool because you need those.
It's a fair question, but I think that comparing yourself to others success is a great way to make yourself feel bad.