Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2012. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new. [hacker news discussion](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969569) *also: see the lists from [2011](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/12/31/the-best-things-and-stuff-of-2011/) and [2010](http://blog.fogus.me/2010/12/30/the-best-things-in-2010/)* Great blog posts read --------------------- * [A short lesson in perspective](http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/) -- *easily the best post of 2012 in my mind.* * [Exponential decay of history](http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/exponential-decay-of-history/) -- *very interesting ideas in cache invalidation* * [Why not events](http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events/) -- *much of this struck home as I read this during a time when I was discovering these lessons the hard way* * [The nine circles of Hell, as depicted in Lego](http://io9.com/5909719/the-nine-circles-of-hell-as-depicted-in-lego) -- *My favorite Lego project of the year* * [microjs](http://microjs.com/) -- *I really admire the intent here and I'd love to see the same effort for other languages* * [Lang.Next 2012 video archive](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2012?sort=status&direction=asc#tab_sortBy_status) -- *much wisdom here* * [The personal analytics of my life](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/) -- *Wolfram's dogged drive to collect data on his life, day in, day out, over the course of decades.* * [Juergen Schmidhuber's home page](http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/) -- *a panoply of amazing things* * [A Yesod tutorial](http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/Yesod-tutorial-for-newbies/) -- *I had great plans to create something with this post as a basis, but alas... still a great post though.* * [Relational shell programming](http://matt.might.net/articles/sql-in-the-shell/) -- *a very nice introduction to relational algebra by Matt Might using bash, cat, sed, etc...* * [APL is more French than English](http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm) -- *I had never read this before this year and loved it.* * [How to Host a Dungeon](http://planet-thirteen.com/Dungeon.aspx) -- *A highly addictive game that I found this year.* * [Joyce's Ulysses - complete audio](http://ubu.com/sound/joyce_ulysses.html) -- *nuff said* * [Engelbart's Violin](http://www.loper-os.org/?p=861) -- *A beautiful post about keyboards and chording and enhancing the human potential.* Most viewed blog posts by me ---------------------------- 1. [10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice/) -- *My most popular post of 2011 was also my most popular of 2012 -- go figure.* 2. [Lisp in 40 32 29 lines of Ruby](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/01/25/lisp-in-40-lines-of-ruby/) 3. [A functional programming influence graph](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/02/a-functional-programming-influence-graph/) 4. [Not enough](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/06/20/not-enough/) 5. [My Clojure compilation series](http://blog.fogus.me/tag/clj-compilation/) 6. [Our industry needs more...](http://blog.fogus.me/2012/11/27/our-industry-needs-more/) Favorite technical books discovered (and read) ---------------------------------------------- * [Warren's Abstract Machine: a tutorial reconstruction](http://wambook.sourceforge.net/) by Hassan Aït-Kaci -- *I'll need to go through this a few more times to truly get it, but it's clear that it's something special.* * [Real World Haskell](http://book.realworldhaskell.org/) by Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen -- *I'm not sure why I waited so long to read this, but I'm thankful that I finally did.* * [The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge](http://www.amazon.com/The-Recursive-Universe-Complexity-Scientific/dp/0809252023?tag=fogus-20) by William Poundstone -- *A beautiful book about cellular automata that I learned of via the [inimitable Reginald Braithwaite](http://twitter.com/raganwald).* * [Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing](http://www.amazon.com/Bootstrapping-Engelbart-Coevolution-Personal-Computing/dp/0804738718/?tag=fogus-20) by Thierry Bardini -- *a wonderful book about one of the true pioneers of computing, his philosophy and his dismissal that I found via [Stanislav Datskovskiy](http://www.loper-os.org).* * [Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas](http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful-Ideas/dp/0465046746/?tag=fogus-20) by Seymour Papert -- *I've read bits and pieces of Papert's works, but I finally had the pleasure to read his most famous work.* * [Electronic Music Review](http://www.ubu.com/emr/periodicals.html) -- *a long dead journal, but still a compelling read.* Favorite non-technical books read --------------------------------- * [Borges: A Life](http://www.amazon.com/Borges-Life-Edwin-Williamson/dp/0670885797/?tag=fogus-20) by Edwin Williamson -- *an account of the life of one of my favorite authors who was less messed up than I thought.* * [In Patagonia](http://www.amazon.com/Patagonia-Penguin-Classics-Bruce-Chatwin/dp/0142437190/?tag=fogus-20) by Bruce Chatwin -- *I've wanted to read this for years, but could never find an affordable copy. It was well worth the wait.* * [The Idiot](http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-Vintage-Classics-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0375702245/?tag=fogus-20) by Dostoevsky -- *through some odd confluence of events I've never read Dostoevsky, so it was very nice to finally read this tense, yet approachable work.* * [Botchan](http://www.amazon.com/Botchan-ebook/dp/B002ZCYAWA/?tag=fogus-20) by Natsume Soseki -- *written in 1906 in Japan this book has a surprisingly modern feel.* * [The Machinery of Life](http://www.amazon.com/The-Machinery-Life-David-Goodsell/dp/0387849246/?tag=fogus-20) by David Goodsell -- *learned of this through Alan Kay and was blown away by it. Amazing illustrations and understandable explanations are a humbling inspiration for someone who's tried to teach a technical topic.* * [The Purple Cloud](http://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cloud-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141196424/?tag=fogus-20) by MP Shiel -- *unbelievably dark* * [The Star Rover](http://www.amazon.com/Star-Rover-Jack-London/dp/1461036305/?tag=fogus-20) by Jack London -- *in American high schools many kids are made to read London's Call of the Wild. A truly progressive school would assign this gem.* * [The Rings of Saturn](http://www.amazon.com/The-Rings-Saturn-W-G-Sebald/dp/0811214133/?tag=fogus-20) by Sebald -- *falls right in the vein of House of Leaves, Kafka, Ovid and the works of Borges.* ## Number of books read [a bunch](http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/266149-michael?page=1&shelf=2011_read&view=covers) ## Number of books published 0 ## Number of books written ⅛ + ¼ ## Number of papers read ≈ 30 ## Number of papers read deeply 7 ## Language zoo additions [A scheme](http://github.com/fogus/caerbannog), [a datalog](http://github.com/fogus/bacwn), [a Meta II](http://github.com/fogus/metafrak), [an Ur-Lisp](http://github.com/fogus/ulithp) Favorite musicians discovered ----------------------------- Rishloo, Anika, Delia Derbyshire, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Stereolab, Ghost, Klaus Nomi, Television Sky, Silver Apples, Belong ## Favorite TV series about zombies The Walking Dead ## Favorite programming languages (or related) Clojure, ClojureScript, Haskell, Datalog, Ruby, Shen, JavaScript, Frink, Pure, Racket ## Programming languages used for projects both professional and not Clojure, Haskell, Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Bash, make, Ruby, C, Prolog, Datalog ## Favorite papers discovered (and read) * [META II: A syntax-oriented compiler writing language](http://ibm-1401.info/AlanKay-META-II.html) by Val Schorre * [Behavioral Software Contracts](http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/Publications/Scheme/thesis-robby.pdf) by Robby Findler ![kay