Every year seems bigger than the one before, but 2015 felt stuffed – in a good way.
Family
My two sons turned 4 and 1 this November. I’d already forgotten what it was like to have an infant and then a baby. It is amazing and tiring and weird. Two kids seems like exponentially more kids than one.
My wife and I had our tenth anniversary! It really doesn’t seem that long ago that we got married.
We went camping more this year than ever before. You wouldn’t think this is true, but camping with little kids is really nice. They’re less crazy than they are at home. They blossom and do amazing things. One of our best camping trips was to Cherokee, NC. We hiked in the Great Smoky Mountains, swam in the Oconaluftee River, and went to an aquarium in Gatlinburg. The drive there and back was a little rough, but the kids loved it. We stayed at the Indian Creek Campground, which I’d recommend to other families.
Work
I’m proud of my accomplishments at work this year. I started the year by teaching the first Python class at The Iron Yard, based off a curriculum I built from scratch. The curriculum is focused on data cleaning and analysis, so I had to teach myself some statistics and probability, and also a lot of tools like NumPy, Pandas, and scikit-learn. I didn’t know Python very well before teaching this class, so I had to bone up on that as well.
I wasn’t planning on leaving teaching for a while, as I enjoy it so much, but I found data science intellectually challenging in a way programming had not been in a while, so I ended up joining the Center for Data Science at RTI International. I’m still on great terms with TIY and look forward to many future guest lectures there.
RTI has been great. I’ve worked on two major projects so far. The first was work with the Harvard South Asia Institute tracking disease at the 2015 Kumbh Mela in India. The second project isn’t public yet, but it’s dealing with emergency services data and it’s been very fun.
I went to PyCon 2015 in Montreál this last spring. Not only was it my favorite conference I’ve been to, but I found Montreál amazing. I’d never been to Canada before and I’d love to go back.
And lastly, I won an award! My work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won a Code for America Technology Award.
Programming
My work involves programming, but I don’t stop when I leave. I’m constantly learning new things and playing around. This year, I improved my skills with:
- Racket
- JavaScript
- Python
- PostgreSQL
And I learned:
Games
I created some small games for competitions, but nothing major. I did play a lot of great RPGs this year:
- Apocalypse World
- Circle of Hands
- Stalker
- Sagas of the Icelanders
- Night Witches
- The Clay That Woke
- World Wide Wrestling
- Duty & Honour
- Monsterhearts
Of those, I’d really like to try The Clay that Woke and Circle of Hands again this year. I only got to play each of them for a short time, and didn’t have a great experience with either. They both seem to have promise, but need a little more air to succeed.
My favorite games I played were Night Witches and Monsterhearts. It’s hard to decide between them. There was a lot of myself in the character I played in Monsterhearts, so it gets a slight edge.
Books
I don’t do a good job of keeping track of what I read. In order to remember, I went back through library emails of books being due. I tried to make sure that at least half of what I read this year was by women writers.
Some of my favorite books I read this year:
- Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman
- The Revenant, Michael Punke
- Acceptance, Authority, and Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
- Find Me, Laura van den Berg
- The Dead Lands, Benjamin Percy
- The Country Of Ice Cream Star, Sandra Newman
- Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
All but the first of those are fiction. My very favorite book I read, however, is non-fiction:
- Unspeakable Things, Laurie Penny
Very few books have left me thinking about them long after I read them. Unspeakable Things kept me up at night, and I still think about it often.
Music
Albums that came out this year (or late last year and I found out about this year) that I listened to over and over:
- No Cities to Love, Sleater-Kinney
- Sometimes I Sit and Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Courtney Barnett
- Full Communism, Downtown Boys
- Painted Shut, Hop Along
- Beat the Champ, The Mountain Goats
- Art Angels, Grimes
- Ivy Tripp, Waxahatchee
- Ghost Notes, Veruca Salt
Two albums that came out in 2014 that I discovered this year and couldn’t stop listening to were:
- Teenage Retirement, Chumped
- All the Ways You Let Me Down, Candy Hearts
Health
I turned 39 this year. I’m still overweight, but I’m not too upset about it. My other vitals are fine. My hair even grew back this year after I left The Iron Yard. I attribute it to sunlight – my office at TIY was in a windowless basement – and less stress.
My mental health is OK. I’ve been doing mindfulness-based therapy with the same therapist for several years now, and I feel like there’s been a lot of progress this year. I’m definitely much more in control of my reactions and more comfortable in my body, which has always been an issue for me.
It feels odd to talk about mental health and therapy in public, but I think it’s important to let others know that there’s hope and help. Depression sapped the joy out of the majority of my life, and it’s only the last few years that I’ve enjoyed being myself. This year was the best so far.