2012 in review

It's the end of an insane year for me. As so many do, it is also time to review the last year. What were my objects? And key results? Back in January, I packed up my car and drove from New Hampshire to the San Francisco Bay Area. My position at UNH switched from research assistant professor to affiliate faculty after 6 and half years as I moved to Google as a GIS Data Engineer and Head of Ocean Engineering. I started at Google on Jan 9 and it's been a while ride since. Google has a pace and scale that boggle the brain. I have read more code this year than all of my prior years combined. How I use and think about version control have gone through a radical shift. Changes have become more like a conversation rather than the broken road stretching out behind me. The concept of "big data" has shift upward to a point where I'm desensitized to the whole thing. First some stats.

My non-google / non-spacecraft work logs show a massive drop in volume. I started seriously trying to do an electronic work log back in 2004.

wc -l kurt-*.{org,txt}
      62 kurt-2002.txt
     475 kurt-2003.txt
   12139 kurt-2004.txt
    6644 kurt-2005.txt
   19332 kurt-2006.txt
   28292 kurt-2007.txt
   28746 kurt-2008.txt
   18740 kurt-2009.txt
   30945 kurt-2010.org
   26031 kurt-2011.org
    6823 kurt-2012.org

But in contrast, my log at Google is no 58000 lines long for 2012. In org mode, I drop todo items as I work along and did that just over 2000 times. 500 of those have been marked done so far and 100 got punted (meaning I'm going to just let the idea go). I'm hoping to power through those items and push the key todo items to the beginning of my 2013 log. I don't have the full GTD (emacs org mode and GTD) thing going on, but it pretty much works for me. I have a lot of ideas where I don't know the merit of the concept, but I would like to know when I came up with it and how it proogressed.

Also, I got introduced to the concept of logging all shell commands that I type. I spend most of my day in Linux with the command line, emacs and Chrome. My shell log is at 54000 commands (12K of those are ls, cd, pushd or popd). I've run build almost 4K times from the shell and git (and related tools) more that 6000 times. Sadly, with my revision control work spread across many many repositories (some public, some private and spread across cvs, svn, hg, git, and perforce), it's very hard to get any useful numbers about versions of things I checked in. In the past, I had one master svn repo that had most of my projects, but that just did not give me the flexibility I needed. One favorit tool... I used grep 3700 times last year on my workstation. Only recently, have I started to extend that kind of logging to my laptop (4K commands so far).

Taking a quick look at my blog posts, I see a sad downward trend. I fell off a blogging cliff September of 2009. Which surprises me. I though it would be April 2010 with Deepwater Horizon exploding. Yes, I'm too lazy to properly lable this graph.

2012-01 11
2012-02 11
2012-03 18
2012-04 17
2012-05 21
2012-06 11
2012-07 5
2012-08 22
2012-09 11
2012-10 13
2012-11 9
2012-12 2

Compared to my normal self, that's not a lot of posts.

So what is the timeline of major events this year? I can't share all of them for a number of reasons and there is a lot of work in progress, but here they are in chronological order from oldest to newest.

• Started at Google
• Attended my first PyData and PyCon conferences
• Released WhaleAlert in the Apple store for iOS
• Went to DC to talk about WhaleAlert at a Congressional Workshop
• Finished all of Research Tools 2011 with a 32 hour YouTube playlist
• On the Mars Science Laboratory / Curiosity team for landing
• Worked on how to effectily use NOAA's VDatum to convert between vertical datums
• Massively updated libais to parse many more messages. Some work on ais-areanotices-py.
• Taught lectures at UNH over Google Hangouts On Air
• Met tons of awesome people from all over the world. So many that my head is going to explode.
• Went to AGU as an exhibitor for the first time
• Got married!

Saved the best for last!