2015: Year in Review

31 December 2015

The year of productivity: software development, travelling, photography. 2015 was the busiest year so far. In this post, I list my favourite movies, TV shows, podcasts and articles of the year.

Code

  • A lot of Ruby on Rails development
  • Web and iOS side projects that I hope will be finished in 2016
  • 1700 commits on GitHub. If all my projects were open-source, I would be in top 200 of most active GitHub users.

1600 commits

Movies

I watched 70 movies in 2015. Too bad, because that's 30 movies less than in 2014.

My personal favourites of 2015 are:

  • Youth
  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Youth Mad Max: Fury Road Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

TV Shows

The favourite ones of 2015:

  • Gravity Falls. This show broke all my expectations. 10/10.
  • Fargo (Season 1) – 10/10
  • Game of Thrones – 10/10.
  • True Detective – 9/10
  • Rick and Morty – 9/10

Books

2015 was the busiest year I have ever had. At the beginning of the year, I set a goal on Goodreads to read 50 books in 2015; I only managed to reach half of the goal, though. I mostly read classics this year and a lot of programming-related books. In 2016, however, I plan to add some variety: business, science fiction, fantasy, etc. The Martian by Andy Weir is one my favourites in 2015.

Traveling

This year I visited the Netherlands; I realized that this is probably the place where I want to live and work.

Photography

I decided to learn photography before my trip to the Netherlands. I got an old DSLR the day before the flight and didn't even know how to use one. I had little time to read the manuals during the flight. I struggled with the camera a lot: it was a real challenge to get the right focus or set a proper focal length.

In the second half of the trip, I switched to an iPhone. The built-in camera was much more intelligent than my old DSLR. I took some great pictures with an iPhone camera, but it's much worse in low light conditions. The other reason to switch was the weight: DSLR weighs 1.3kg whereas my iPhone is just 100g—a couple of hours of walking and the neck starts to hurt.

Once I got home, I realized how terrible my pictures were: I shot most of the images at the widest focal length with horrible barrel distortion. I didn't set up my autofocus correctly: it focused using the centre AF-point, and it took the camera a few seconds to focus, which was very annoying. And the most terrible mistake—I didn't shoot RAW. I was constrained when I was post-processing images—lesson learned.

Music

Top albums:

  • Blurryface by twenty one pilots. The discovery of the year. The music without genre. The music that makes you think. The variety of styles amazes me. Blurryface is the first album I liked completely — every song of the album.
  • Art Angels by Grimes
  • Magnifique by Ratatat

Blurryface Art Angels Magnifique

I also picked up a ukulele this year—heavily inspired by twenty one pilots. So maybe I'll record a few covers the following year.

Podcasts

  • Cortex. CGP Grey and Myke Hurley discuss productivity (and many other things). There's nothing special in the podcast; it's just so interesting to listen to that it has become my favourite—definitely recommended.
  • Under the Radar. I stopped listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast because the episodes were too long (up to 2 hours), had very few development-related topics, and I didn't have time to listen. I was already listening to David Smith's Developer Perspective: I liked the format of short 15-minute episodes. And then Under the Radar comes out: just 30 minutes of developer-related talks from David Smith and Marco Arment. Perfect.
  • If I could recommend just one episode, it would be The Developer on Fire episode – The Pareto Principle and Stoic Philosophy with David Heinemeier Hansson.

Cortex Under the Radar

Articles