At the start of the year I posted my Themes for 2015. I decided now is a good time to look at what I was thinking at the start of the year and see how my year turned out. I think it is sort of pointless to set out some ideas of things you want to accomplish if you never stop and assess what you actually did, so this is sort of an accountability post to myself to see how things played out for the year.

I noticed that a bunch of people when they post to Twitter have much cooler looking posts than what the Jetpack plugin seemed to be doing for me on my blog. Over Thanksgiving I was looking into this a bit and discovered Twitter Cards. I am probably the last person on the internet finding out about them, but I hadn’t really paid that much attention to it previously. I decided maybe I should create a plugin to add them to the blog. But this being Wordpress I did a search first and it looks like there is already a great one out there. This post is just me testing it out and seeing how it works. I often see people say that a great way to develop a little side income is to create a Wordpress plugin and sell it. I actually wonder how people do that because it seems like every time I need some sort of plugin to add functionality to the blog I can find an amazing free plugin that does it for me. Anyway hopefully this test post works and I get a Twitter Card for it.

I hit the one year mark of my blog while I was on thanksgiving break. I had intended to post on the day of the event, but I was busy with family in Minnesota and never got around to it. Back when I started this my intention was to try to write something about once a week. While I haven’t been completely successful with that when life intervenes and keeps me busy, I do see that I have exactly 52 posts so I at least averaged it over the year. All in all I would say this has been a successful venture for me. I learned a lot playing with some SEO things and seeing how things would show up in search engines from here. I was also able to learn a ton about SSL configuration of the site. On that note I have considered actually dropping TLS 1.0 support. While that would drop a bunch of old browsers I think consensus is that is the next protocol to fall since SSL 3 has pretty much been declared as insecure. Probably if I was a busy people would say not to do that since you want to be accessible to the maximum number of users, but since I maybe have 3 readers who are all technology people they would see no impact and it would allow me to crank the security down to the next level.

Over Thanksgiving vacation I was thinking I should maybe play around with Swift and maybe try to create a basic iPhone app just to see what the programming model was like. I headed over to Code School to see if they had a free course I could play around with. Unfortunately they didn’t, but I did see the Objective C course over there. My thinking was given that most iOS apps were written in that, why not do that course.

I may have mentioned this before, but I love going to software conferences. When I got the email mentioning that Cassandra Days was coming to Dallas with a free 1 day conference on all things Cassandra, I signed up immediately. The event was sponsored by Datastax who sells a commercial version of Cassandra called Datastax Enterprise. They had 2 tracks an introductory track for people who are just exploring Cassandra, but haven’t yet taken it to production, and track 2 which was a deeper dive for people with experience with Cassandra.

I have been thinking for a while that a MacBook Pro looked like the ideal Java development machine. That being said I didn’t really want to drop $2500 to actually confirm my idea. I had suggested it at work, but corporate policy had us on Dell machines. Anyway last week I mentioned that I think the ideal developer setup would be buying us all MacBook Pros and one of my coworkers was kind enough to mention that there was an unused on the front end team occasionally needs to debug issues on the mobile devices but otherwise I could use it. Thus began my first week trying it out as a replacement machine.

I attended the kegs & code last night. It was a code challenge and party with cash prizes that was hosted by Saltt Ventures. I had never attended a code challenge or hack-a-thon or anything like that, but I figured it is good to get out of your comfort zone every now and then and try something new. Plus when they have free beer that is a pretty big perk. The beer was supplied by BrainDead Brewery which I hadn’t had prior to this event. The event started out as a happy hour with pizza and beer and then at some point we setup and the challenge began. It was a race to solve 10 problems in the quickest amount of time with first place getting $500, second $250 and third $100.

I saw some friends on Facebook discussing Duolingo. While I had briefly heard of it I had never paid attention to it. So I decided to log on and check it out. It is pretty cool, as an intermediate level Spanish speaker I wanted to see how I did on their placement test and what the classes were like.

First off it is free which is a good way to get people interested. They follow the things that it seems like all the popular sites are doing and gamify learning a foreign language. So you see your friends, and you see how much experience they have earned in the last week, month and overall. You have a streak counter (like stack overflow) to track consecutive days you are practicing (which is also important for foreign language learning so you are getting repetition daily). When you level up role playing game style you receive their virtual currency which you can save up and use to buy bonus courses. And you see all your friends events which encourage you to keep working at it so you pass them in the rankings.

I took advantage of the long weekend to go through CodeSchool’s Shaping up with Angular.js free course. I have to say it was very well done. They very quickly get the major themes across in the video and then you apply the stuff in your browser where you can see how it actually affects the page in the preview page. Anyone who has worked on the knockout.js tutorial will recognize this style of learning. Having taken the class on CodeSchool I now feel like I know enough to actually start using Angular so I would definitely recommend the course to anyone wanting to get started with Angular. I remember that first aha moment I had when learning knockout, where it was just sort of mind blowing how much more productive you could be in that framework than just using jQuery. And I had the same sort of thing with Angular, I can see why I would prefer to use Angular over knockout as well as it seems to take the great things that knockout does and take it up to the next level. To get someone who isn’t a super front end person interested in a front end technology is an impressive feat so well done Angular.

We had some workshops over the last couple of days at work on an intro to Angular.js. I have to say I came away from them pretty impressed with the framework. I can see why it is taking the development world by storm.

I think the controllers make it very relate able for anyone coming from the Java world as it is like dealing with Spring or Struts at that point. The way you do URL parameters in your $routeparams is just like doing any sort of rest URL parameters.