Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2010. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.

Great blog posts read

Understanding Pac-man Ghost Behavior

Clojure Unsupervised Part-Of-Speech Tagger Explained

Reading Code is Good, Writing Documentation is Better

SHRDLU Resurrection

Herbert Stoyan’s Lisp collection at CHM

Federer as Religious Experience

Monads are not Metaphors

The Original Dungeons and Dragons

Manly Slang from the 19th Century

Most viewed blog posts by me

Clojure’s Mini-languages

MartinOdersky take(5) toList

clojure.rb

Favorite technical books discovered (and read)

A Programming Language by Iverson

Transaction Processing by Gray

Thinking Forth by Brodie

Land of Lisp by Barski M.D.

Elegant Ruby by Olsen

Favorite non-technical books read

Breakfast of Champions

Perdido Street Station

In the Country of Last Things

Go for Beginners

Kafka on the Shore

Number of books read

77

Number of books written

1

Number of papers read

≈ 150

Number of papers read deeply

≈ 40

Favorite musicians discovered

Pantha du Prince

Oneohtrix Point Never

Sun Ra

Andrew Thomas

Scientist

Favorite Albums Released in 2010

Andrew Thomas - Between Buildings And Trees

Pantha du Prince - Black Noise

Demdike Stare - Liberation Through Hearing

Favorite TV series about zombies

The Walking Dead

Clojure, Haskell, Io, Qi, Coffeescript, Lombok, Datalog

Programming languages used for projects both professional and not

Clojure, Scala, Java, Python, Javascript, SQL, Bash, make, Ruby, C, C++, Potion, CLIPS, Ix, Common Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Datalog

Favorite papers discovered (and read)

Soft Stratification for Transformation-Based Approaches to Deductive Databases by Andreas Behrend

The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages by D.A. Turner

Practical Predicate Dispatch by Todd Millstein

The Design and Implementation of Typed Scheme by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt and Matthias Felleisen

Extending the Scope of Syntactic Abstraction by Waddell and Dybvig

ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler For Scheme by David Kranz

Still haven’t read…

Lisp in Small Pieces, Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, Snow Crash, Spook Country, A Fire upon the Deep, Ulysses, Programmer avec Scheme, The Sirens of Titan, Manufacturing Consent

Best conference attended

The first Clojure Conj

People met, read, worked with, followed, and/or corresponded with whom motivated and/or influenced me greatly and always made me think

My wife, Christopher Houser, George Jahad, Christophe Grand, Rich Hickey, Stuart Halloway, David Liebke, Zach Beane, Russ Olsen, Peter Seibel, Jeffrey Straszheim, Brenton Ashworth, Anthony Simpson, Zachary Kim, Stanislav Datskovskiy, James Iry, Steve Yegge, Outlaw Vern, Yukihiro Matsumoto, Meikel Brandmeyer, Nurullah Akkaya, Chas Emerick, Ranier Joswig, Steve Jenson, Lau Jensen, Erik Naggum, Oleg Kiselyov, Christian Neukirchen, Shiro Kawai, Kazimir Majorinc, Steve Webster, Mark Tarver, Manuel Simoni, Paul Snively, and Jürgen Hötzel.

Favorite code read

Pods by Rich Hickey

debug-repl by George Jahad

html.clj in Marginalia by Zachary Kim

regex by Christophe Grand

horizon.clj by Kevin Downey (aka. hiredman)

OPS5

scala-dataflow by Jonas Bonér

letrec by Michał Marczyk

thrush by Chris Houser

Service DSL by Rainer Joswig

tailopt.js by Guillaume Lathoud

Baysick with continuations by Daniel Spiewak

Wood and Stones by Reginald Braithwaite

Life changing technology

Kindle 3

Instapaper

Dropbox

Software Preservation Society

Plans for 2011

See you next year.

:F


  1. One side-effect of the book is that I have not had time to bake the other half of many private projects. It’ll be nice to actually have some time to work on code and push it out into the wild… instead of just writing about it.↩︎

  2. Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay. — Christopher Hitchens↩︎