Ringing in 2019 - My Year in Review

Hey y'all, it's New Year's Eve! That means parties, new year's resolutions, and year in review posts! I'm gonna discuss a bit of what I did this year, and share my favorite pics (of me of course) from this year! To start though, my New Year's resolution is to quit smoking cigs. Noticeably affect my health, my gf, fam, and friends mostly don't smoke and hate the habit, and I spend way too much on them. Bought my last pack today, gonna try to wean off for a day or two then stop.

Before all of this, I'd like to thank the whole Steem community for being awesome and inclusive, and especially everyone who's voted for me as a witness, helped me out, or just been fun to interact with! Cheers!

^{Me at the beginning of this year with my little bro}

I'm gonna organize this by topic instead of by time period, since most of them overlap chronologically.

College

^{Studying hard as always}

Did as well as I always do in college, passed some classes, dropped others. Finished the two that I had been dreading (Writing 1133 and my Advanced Seminar, which was also mostly writing), due to my dislike of DU's writing classes. The ASEM was great actually, a lot better than I expected, and Writ was also pretty good, really enjoyed writing my final paper (an art catalog essay technically?) about The Three Crosses, a print by Rembrandt.

My Computer Science classes I mostly enjoyed, as always. Secure Computational Methods (which I dropped), sucked though, as one of the few classes taught by an old-fashioned professor, where 50% of the points were from turning in summaries of your notes from the last week. I had a ~95 in the programming assignments, but failed to turn in most summaries (hard to summarize what you didn't take) and professor recommended I drop. Was a bit disappointing, as I enjoyed the content, but those old fashioned lecture classes kill me.

As you might know if you read my personal posts, I'm not finishing college right now. I've only got two classes left (Linear Algebra and a 3000 level CS class, woo!), but no money. Not planning on going into debt for college, and already picked up a 'adult' job, so I'm gonna finish once I can afford to pay for them myself. Feels weird not being in school anymore though, after 17 or whatever years.

Career

^{My russian hockey suit}

I've dropped and picked up many a job this year. Quit working at Insomnia Cookies as a driver in February, started working for Postmates immediately. After the school year, I got my job at Animatra as a contractor, then the first employee, at the beginning of the summer and I've been loving it. Might not have funding yet, but it's great being able to apply what I've learned in school to learn new languages and toolkits to code up our app. Almost got a beta release ready, after punting many features to the 1.1 because we've only got two coders. I'll share as soon as it's available, but the site is up (not by me), with v2 of the prototype that I built. Also has a lot of information about the app overall, which is great since I'm not the best at explaining what it's for :P

I've also recently picked up a job at my girlfriend's ice rink, which is amazing. Much better than Postmates cash and time wise, plus less gas to drive. Coaching kids, skating all the time, and getting paid to watch (and scorekeep) hockey is so much fun. Never thought that playing hockey as a kid would help me out as an adult, other than something to connect over, since I definitely wasn't pro material. Trying to figure out how to get my referee license renewed, since apparently they don't do it after November (wtf?), but I'm a sub for no-shows anyways.

Personal

^{When SKC tied the Rapids after the 85th}

A lot has happened personally this year too. I've basically quit drinking altogether, stopped doing anything else other than (legal) weed and I'm working on the cigs. Got an amazing girlfriend, very smart, funny, and hot as hell. I've been eating better (less fast food) and getting more into shape, although that's mostly from the skating. Planning on working out more, but it's really annoying that my apartment building gym doesn't have a squat rack, just a smith machine (I think?) and a bunch of cardio equipment. Only nice thing is the infinite climbing wall, which kills me endurance wise, but isn't a very technical climb at all. My personal life has really pulled its shit together this year, and I think it shows in all aspects of my public life.

^{my best friend and I are two peas in a pod}

Steem

I can't remember when I request an account on Steemit, but it was probably around Jan or Feb, when I was messing around with a lot of cryptos (made like $300 off $20, but had to pull out early since I needed the money). Logged in for the first time after having a discussion about having a token for Animatra, looking into the best blockchain network for free, high-throughput transactions. Steem is (obviously) the best blockchain for this, but I found a community I love in it as well! Set up a witness server pretty quickly, probably should have waited to become more established, but it's been going well so far! Thanks to a big vote from @surpassinggoogle, I've signed two blocks this past week, and probably a third today.

Really loved the witness community as well, @bobinson is great, and paid me a great compliment that I forgot to thank him for in his witness survey (Thanks man! Honestly means a lot to me that you'd say that), @therealwolf is pretty awesome, working with him on the SteemApps discord bot, and probably some others I've forgotten. Outside of witnesses, I joined the Lion's Den, with @larrythelion and @balticbadger and more, set up a discord bot/voter for the channel, and have had some great convos with them. Utopian-io has been great for me as a programmer, offering the equivalent of open-source freelance opportunities that helped me test my mettle at languages I already knew, and ones that I learnt myself to work on the tasks. I've also been in the MSP, hosted by @aggroed et al., which is really just a great community by itself. I'm certain I'm still forgetting more, I'll just call it a short list of those who really stood out to me.

Personal Projects

Over my time in college, I've often started a personal project, only to leave it behind unfinished. My first one, a blog, I actually finished and published, but ran out of my AWS free tier, so took it down (saved data though). I never posted as much as I had planned to on it. I worked on a C compiler by myself for a bit, called it tag c compiler (TCC), but after a summer working on it, was barely past lexing and parsing (although apparently most people don't write those parts themselves). Not too worried about that one, did it more to show myself how languages work and read up on some of the books, if you haven't read Dick Grune's Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide I recommend it, real page-turner (sarcasm ofc, but I actually love the book, need to buy a print version). Mined Eth for a bit as well, that actually worked out but eventually stopped so I could use my gaming laptop to game (made about $200).

On Steem though, it's amazing. I can receive quick feedback from people who follow me, get some amount of compensation very quickly, and there's tons to work on. Due to this, I've had multiple projects go through so far, although not all my own. Here's a list:

• Pywit- A witness tool-kit built in Python on top of Holger80's Beempy. My own project.
• UlogsV2- Ulogs v2, for which I've been working on several tasks, requested by surpassinggoogle.
• The Lion's Den bot/autovoter, with no github since it's very thrown together, but works well.
• SteemApps Discord-Bot- Which I've been working with therealwolf on, much better discord bot implementation than the previous, but doesn't require a Steem process in it which makes it easier. Note: if anyone has tips on formatting discord messages with multiple images, without having to send multiple messages, please help me out! Have embeds working but it sends a message per image :/
• Steem-Pro: No Github yet, but this is my current (somewhat tentative) name for the desktop/mobile interface for Steem I've been working on. Been a bit tight-lipped about it, not going to have a release for New Year's Day probably either, but that's what it's gonna be. Sitting on steem-pro.com for now, need to figure out a cheap way to get a site up there. No release tomorrow, but I'll probably make a post this week on what to expect in the whole app, and the beta release as well.

And that's it for 2018 for me! Obviously a big year, some might say the biggest year yet for for me, no one's ever seen bigger. Happy New Year's y'all, enjoy the last vestiges of 2018 if it's not already 2019 for you!

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