found drama

2012: that’s a wrap!

In a personal tradition going back to 2007, I set goals (“not resolutions”) for myself for the year, trying to stick to so-called “SMART” goals. The original 2012 goals post was here, and yes: I’ve been keeping track. ¹ As the year closes, it is time to reflect upon those goals once again, and to see how much I’ve managed to accomplish.

1. Exercise: ≥4 days each week. Overall? Not too bad. Though I did not get outside or onto the treadmill 4 times each week every week, it was definitely most weeks, and with the exception of December, ² my actual walking/running achievements were about twice what I targeted. Climbing was way down this year (only 20 times), but anyone could have seen that coming. Now, the graphs:
   
   
   
2. Reading: ≥36 books. Far and away my best year. Somewhere in the vicinity of 60 books–many of them by “new to me” authors, and a pretty even split between fiction and non-fiction. ³
   

   Book	Author	Date	Links
   Neanderthal	John Darnton	1/2	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Cardinal of the Kremlin 4	Tom Clancy	1/15	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Animal Farm 4	George Orwell	1/19	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   We Are in a Book! 5	Mo Willems	1/21	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Grendel 4	John Gardner	1/24	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Embassytown	China Miéville	2/12	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal 4	Christopher Moore	2/22	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Quiet	Susan Cain	3/1	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Intuitionist 6	Colson Whitehead	3/6	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Against a Dark Background	Iain M. Banks	3/21	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   The Joy of Clojure 4 7	Fogus & Houser	3/22 8	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Running Lean 9	Ash Maurya	3/25	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Mobile Design Pattern Gallery 9	Theresa Neil	3/29	my review; Goodreads; Amazon.com
   Little House in the Big Woods	Laura Ingalls Wilder	3/31 10	Goodreads; Amazon.com
   jQuery UI 9	Eric Sarrion	4/9	my review
   Code Simplicity 9	Max Kanat-Alexander	4/26	my review
   Infinite Jest 4	David Foster Wallace	4/29	Notes
   Farmer Boy 10	Laura Ingalls-Wilder	5/1
   Little House on the Prairie 10	Laura Ingalls-Wilder	5/15
   Clojure Programming 9	Chas Emerick	5/19	my review
   Maintainable JavaScript	Nicholas C. Zakas	5/23	my review
   The Wise Man’s Fear	Patrick Rothfuss	5/27	Goodreads
   The Little MongoDB Book	Karl Seguin	6/1	Goodreads
   The Invention of Hugo Cabret	Brian Selznick	6/4
   Kanban and Scrum: Making the Most of Both	Henrik Kniberg	6/9	Goodreads
   Player Piano	Kurt Vonnegut	6/10	Goodreads
   The REST API Design Rulebook 9	Mark Massé	6/12	my review
   Imagine: How Creativity Works	Jonah Lehrer	6/17	my review
   Alien Contact (anthology)	Marty Halpern	6/21	my review
   Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod 9	Michael Snoyman	6/30 11	my review
   Web Workers: Multithreaded Programs in JavaScript 9	Ido Green	7/8	my review
   The Art of Agile Development	James Shore & Shane Warden	7/9	Goodreads 12
   A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	Dave Eggers	7/10	Goodreads
   The Stars My Destination	Alfred Bester	7/19	Goodreads
   Team Geek 9	Brian W. Fitzpatrick & Ben Collins-Sussman	7/27	my review
   The Lost World	Michael Crichton	7/28	Goodreads
   Maven by Example	Tim O’Brien, John Casey, & Brian Fox	7/30	Goodreads
   Hyperion 4	Dan Simmons	8/14	Goodreads
   Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!	Miran Lipovača	8/17	n/a
   Python for Data Analysis 7 9	Wes McKinney	8/23	Goodreads; my review
   Brief Interviews with Hideous Men 4	David Foster Wallace	8/25	Goodreads
   Regular Expressions Cookbook (2nd Edition) 9	Jan Goyvaerts & Steven Levithan	9/3	my review
   In the Country of Last Things	Paul Auster	9/4	Goodreads
   Learning JavaScript Design Patterns 9	Addy Osmani	9/15	my review, author’s response
   I, Robot	Isaac Asimov	9/17	Goodreads
   Accessibility Handbook 9	Katie Cunningham	9/24	my review
   The Caves of Steel	Isaac Asimov	9/26	Goodreads
   Ignorance: How it Drives Science	Stuart Firestein	10/5	Goodreads
   Gulliver’s Travels	Jonathan Swift	10/6	Goodreads
   Head First HTML and CSS 9	Elisabeth Robson	10/6	my review
   Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 4	Haruki Murakami	10/21	Goodreads
   Valley of Death 13	William Bebb	10/30	Goodreads
   Gun, with Occasional Music 4	Jonathan Lethem	11/4	Goodreads
   Git in the Trenches	Peter Savage	11/6	Goodreads
   JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (6th Ed.)	David Flanagan	11/19	Goodreads
   The Hobbit 4 14	J.R.R. Tolkein	11/20	Goodreads
   Node for Front-End Developers	Garann Means	11/20	Goodreads
   HTML5 and JavaScript Web Apps 9	Wesley Hales	11/24	my review
   My Father’s Dragon	Ruth Stiles Gannett	12/5	Goodreads
   The Fellowship of the Ring 4	J.R.R. Tolkien	12/8	Goodreads
   Testable JavaScript	Mark Ethan Trostler	12/12	Goodreads
   ClojureScript: Up & Running 9	Stuart Sierra & Luke VanderHart	12/16	my review
   Principles of Object-Oriented Programming in JavaScript 7	Nicholas C. Zakas	12/18	Goodreads

   Additionally, here’s a few other books that I read ¹⁵ during the year, but which I wouldn’t go so far as to say “I read it”:

   • The Bash Cookbook, Carl Albing;
   • Effective Java, by Joshua Bloch;
   • Beginning Java 7 by Jeff Friesen;
   • The JavaScript Pocket Reference (3rd Ed.), David Flanagan;
   • a bunch of stories from a bunch of John Joseph Adams collections, including: Wastelands, Federations, and Brave New Worlds; and also
   • …dozens and dozens of kids books. Golden books. “Magic School Bus” books. Kiddo science books. The list goes on and on.
3. Reading: 10 new authors. Vide supra, and/but: 41 “new to me” authors all together.
4. Writing: ≥5 hours each week; 1000+ words per session. Mixture of “huge success” and “epic failure” here. January through April (pre-baby) was a rocket ship of productivity. I even finished a pretty strong draft of my novel. That sharply dropped off after E. was born; May and June were practically non-starters–and/but that also had to do with some other stress. I made a go of it the rest of the year, but circumstances and fortune were not smiling upon me. The motivation is still there, but the wells for time, energy, and inspiration are all pretty dry at the moment. Perhaps when the boys are older and I’m better rested?
   
   Also: no, no graph for “words per session”. I wound up not tracking that closely, especially since so many writing sessions also doubled as editing sessions and were as much “reading” as “writing”.
5. Writing: Finish a draft of my novel-in-progress. Vide supra; this is complete. March 13th was when I “finished” that first draft. After a re-read and some notes, I sent it out to some beta readers in August; I even got a decent set of feedback/notes back from one of them. (The rest of you: where are your remarks!?) I’ve been slowly pecking away at revisions. I also submitted it to Harper Voyager during their “open submission” period this year. (As I haven’t heard back by now, I doubt that I will–still, it was worth a shot. And now I’m not locked in to that version of the story.)
6. Code: Write something (anything!) in Clojure. Fell flat on my face here. I tinkered with it. I dicked around with it. I didn’t build anything substantial with it. I got about 25% of the way through a project, but kept fizzling out. (I was going to port my Goodreads Timeline Generator from Groovy to Clojure but got bogged down in the land of XML and “zippers”; then I got further distracted by trying to port that same app from Groovy to Node.js.) Anyway: here’s as far as I got.

Also: some other things that seemed worth noting:

• We had another baby. That was… pretty awesome. (Also: we are doing a picture-a-day for his first year, just like we did with H.)
• I tried beef liver for the first time; didn’t like it.
• Though I didn’t ski my first black diamond trail (that was … 2 years ago?) I skied more of them in a single season than ever before. Including one or two at Bolton where I’d previously chickened out. ¹⁶
• For better or worse, I radically cut back on coffee. Like down to maybe 10% of my in-take from the beginning of the year.
• I wound up getting pretty “engaged” with quite a few people on Twitter and Goodreads. A bunch of my blog posts got traction. Those were fun conversations. So… social media FTW?
• I posted 1461 pictures to my Flickr stream this year. (And took many, many more.) This brings my total Flickr stream up to 13,164 photos and videos.
• Favorite short story from the year: Jake Kerr’s “Requiem in the Key of Prose”.
• Favorite novel read this year: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead. It’s hardly new (published in 1999) but it was new to me. Hell, somehow I hadn’t even heard of Colson Whitehead until this year. Anyway: it was amazing.
• Favorite technical book of the year: Clojure Programming by Chas Emerick. I’ve said this a few times now: something about Clojure really brings out the “lucid” in those that choose to write about it.
• Favorite non-technical non-fiction of the year: tie between Susan Cain’s Quiet and Team Geek by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussan. Want to know why? Reviews are here and here, respectively.
• Most viewed post of 2012: still “ambulothanatophobia”. (I’m still #1 in Google for “zombie phobia”, I guess.)
• Most viewed new post of 2012: my review of Clojure Programming. (I believe I have @fogus to thank for that.)
• Most viewed new post of 2012 that wasn’t a book review: my post on headless JavaScript unit testing with Jasmine and PhantomJS — which was the “blog post” version of the VT Code Camp talk I gave this year. Pretty happy with how that all came together, actually.
• Most controversial post: almost definitely “Agile for the Introvert”.

I’m sure I could go on, but I fear I’ve already gotten tedious. In any case, 2012 was a crazy year — and not just w/r/t/ the above goals. In many ways, I’m glad to see it coming to an end; let’s say that I’m happy to move on and away from some of its … dramatic flourish. Looking forward to 2013. ¹⁷

See you next year.

1. Check-in posts: Q1, Q2, and Q3.[↩]
2. ”Funny story there…” We were painting a door in that room. The treadmill was more/less out of commission the whole month of December.[↩]
3. We can thank the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program for that.[↩]
4. A re-read.[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
5. Yes, it’s a kid’s book. So what? I read it for The Boy enough times.[↩]
6. Which, seriously, I know I don’t have my own review posted anywhere but… 5-stars. Really: go out and read it right now.[↩]
7. Note: I had a hand in editing this book.[↩][↩][↩]
8. But I’d been working on this one since… July 2011? A good long while.[↩]
9. Note: read as part of the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program.[↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩][↩]
10. Though admittedly: that was a co-read with A., for H.; and A. did most of the reading.[↩][↩][↩]
11. …or 7/1, depending on how you figure the fuzzy end on this one, for me.[↩]
12. Also: “Agile for the Introvert”.[↩]
13. Abandoned.[↩]
14. Read aloud with H.[↩]
15. As in “read stories from” or “referenced frequently” or “read significant portions of”…[↩]
16. Sure, laugh all you want. I’ll take my wins, however small.[↩]
17. Goals to follow soon![↩]

About Rob Friesel