2014 in review

As in previous years, I would like to make a review of the year 2014. A lot of things happened: new job, new home, new city, new country. Doing all of that was not an easy task and takes a lot of time. Yet, I was able to achieve multiple goals and continue learning :-).
Here is my github contributions this year. You can see that big gap between July and October. This was the time when all the changes happened, interviews, new job, relocation, ...

gonawin:

The main project of this year was gonawin, a social web application which I did with Remy Jourde and Carmen to make friendly bets on sport games with your friends. The repository is on github with the name of gonawin.
It was built in Go, Google App Engine and AngularJS. We got a total of 81 users and about 50 active users for the world cup. We are planning to continue working on this project and keep improving it step by step.

Moocs:

The only online course that I made this year was Learning from data. I had already done this course in python here, but I decided to do it again in Go. I haven't finished it yet, right now I am doing the implementation of Support Vector Machines. There are two reasons on why I am doing this course again. The first one is to continue learning Go. The second reason is that I want to build my own Machine learning framework in Go in order to use it in future projects that I have in mind. One of them is a Machine Learning Visualizer built in Go and d3.js. The github repository for this online course is available: here

Continue learning Go:

I set this as one of my goals for 2013, and I continue to progress in this topic. I did several projects in order to learn more about this language.
The main one was gonawin, a web application whose backend is written in Go.
After we finished this app, we decided to start refactoring some parts of the code and improving the app itself. So we created a github organization called taironas and we are currently working on two projects:

• route, a URL router that allows regex expression in URL paths.
• tinygraphs, an avatar generator web service.

I also attended a DotGo conference which was really fun. And I blogged about some Go things I have discovered while coding:

• Order dates chronologically in Go
• Playing with images in HTTP response in golang

More learning:

Books I have read and worked on:

• The algorithm design manual
  • Mainly some reading through the first 6 chapters and I started coding the exercises of the first 2 chapters in this repo.
• Cracking the coding interview
  • This is a great book if you want to get in shape and ready for some interviews.

Project wish list for 2015:

Here is what I wish to accomplish this year:

• Finish main work on the route package.
• Finish first version of the web service avatar generator tinygraphs.
• Enhance gonawin.
• Finish caltechx.go
• Extract the machine learning code from caltechx.go into a separate repo.
• Make a web site to visualize machine learning models and methods using d3.js.
• Any interesting unplanned project :-)

Let's see what 2015 brings. :-)

Santiaago