found drama

Third quarter of 2013 is wrapping up. Wow… so much has happened. Let’s reflect on this year’s goals? ¹ And now… by the numbers:

1. Reading: 48+ books in 2013. As we get to the end of September, I’ve finished 31 books for the year so far. That’s about five short of pace, and it’s the first real sign that I might not make the year’s goal. But September has also been off-the-rails busy. (Excuses, excuses…) In any case:
   
   

   Title	Author	Finished
   JavaScript Enlightenment	Cody Lindley	1/1
   Cloud Atlas	David Mitchell	1/7
   Pocket Genius: Space 2	DK Publishing	1/10
   Blindsight	Peter Watts	1/22
   Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom	Cory Doctorow	1/27
   Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 3	J.K. Rowling	2/5
   The Unbearable Lightness of Being 4	Milan Kundera	2/20
   Doom Days	Arlene Blakely	2/28
   R in a Nutshell 5	Joseph Adler	3/9
   Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	3/15
   Beginning Java 7 5	Jeff Friesen	3/16
   Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 3	J.K. Rowling	3/19
   Functional JavaScript 6	Mike Fogus	3/23
   A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula K. Le Guin	3/23
   Revelation Space	Alastair Reynolds	4/28
   Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban	J.K. Rowling	4/29
   JavaScript Testing with Jasmine: JavaScript Behavior-Driven Development	Evan Hahn	5/3
   Programming Grails	Burt Beckwith	5/12
   The Two Towers	J.R.R. Tolkien	5/14
   Ender’s Game	Orson Scott Card	6/6
   Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder	Nassim Nicholas Taleb	6/12
   Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs	Tom Stuart	7/6
   A Princess of Mars	Edgar Rice Burroughs	7/19
   AngularJS	Brad Green	7/24
   Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	8/13
   Functional JavaScript: Introducing Functional Programming with Underscore.js 7	Michael Fogus	8/18
   The Little Book on CoffeeScript	Alex MacCaw	8/20
   The Neverending Story 3 8	Michael Ende	8/24
   Cat’s Cradle	Kurt Vonnegut	8/27
   Mother Night	Kurt Vonnegut	9/4
   Programming JavaScript Applications: Robust Web Architecture with Node, HTML5, and Modern JS Libraries	Eric Elliot	9/5
   The Man in the High Castle	Philip K. Dick	9/18
   Jasmine JavaScript Testing	Paulo Ragonha	9/26

2. Reading: these 12 specific books. As I said last time around: “This always seems like a much better goal when I set it.” I’ve chipped away at these, but as the year has gone on, I’ve become either less interested in them or else found them difficult to come by. And I feel like maybe I ought to drop one or two of them for some of the other’s I’ve read this year. (E.g., Never Let Me Go.)
   • The Rings of Saturn
   • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
   • The Third Man
   • Ethan Frome
   • Revelation Space
   • Cat’s Cradle
   • A Wizard of Earthsea
   • Midnight’s Children
   • The French Lieutenant’s Woman
   • The Pragmatic Programmer
   • The Blind Assassin
   • The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
3. Exercise: Average 25 miles or more per month. Still running. Sometimes quite a bit (4-5 times a week) sometimes hardly at all. I’ll take what I can get.
   
4. Learn some R. While I’d say that I learned “enough” in the Data Analysis course, I decided to go ahead and start Roger Peng’s “Computing for Data Analysis” with A. a couple weeks ago. It has been… more fun.
5. Learn some Python. Last quarter I pondered whether I should change this goal. I’ve done basically nothing toward this. I don’t even think I’ve logged into the Code Academy course work in the past three months. But I also feel like there’s some truth to that joke about Python being pseudocode that just happens to run. How much Python did I want to learn? And to what end? And after learning what I’ve learned in the past couple years about JavaScript and Groovy and Java and R and Ruby and Clojure and… others… why single out Python at all? Why not just assume that I can get by when I need it, and otherwise not bother worrying about it?
6. “Ship” one trivial “novelty” app. Boom. Project Management Dev Dice. Done. And/but: it’s funny how I’ve started to parley that into a larger study of AngularJS.

And a few other quick notes which aren’t exactly goals for the year and/but are worth jotting down here:

• Sold my first piece of fiction. Just got this news in writing today. “Where the Air Is Sweet and the Clouds Are a Different Shape” will appear in Please Do Not Remove, which is being edited by Angela Palm and should be coming out in Spring 2014.
• A decade at DDC. When I took that job, I really didn’t think I’d be there for all that long. We were in VT just long enough for A.’s grad school thing to happen. But that opportunity has really worked out well for me and for us. And ten years is a long time.
• Two talks. I gave a talk on functional programming in JavaScript (link) back in June, and then I gave a talk on AngularJS at VT Code Camp (third year in a row; link). Both were well-attended. The BurlingtonJS talk being well-attended I just chalked up to it being a popular event. My Code Camp talk managed to draw around 45 people–more/less packing the room that day. So that was cool.

It’s turned into a pretty damn good year. A few months to go and/but let’s not tempt fate and/but… I see no reason not to believe that it will continue to be this good.

1. First Quarter results are here: /2013/03/2013-goals-q1-check-in; Q2 is here: /2013/07/2013-goals-q2-check-in/[↩]
2. What? Don’t look at me like that.[↩]
3. With Holden.[↩][↩][↩]
4. See also: Dating Without Kundera.[↩]
5. ”Done enough.”[↩][↩]
6. Pre-release. As a reviewer.[↩]
7. ”Wait! Was that on here twice?” Yes it was.[↩]
8. Man that took a long time…[↩]

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