It’s time to get rid of a jacket I’ve had for a long time.
Pouring beer in the jacket in 2009 at Indyhall.
I don’t remember exactly when I got it. Sometime between 2006 and 2009. Maybe at the Cherry Hill Mall Macy’s.
The jacket has been with me almost my entire adult life. It’s still in pretty good shape, too, but just doesn’t fit me like it used to. We’ve drifted apart but had our adventures.
Wearing it at a kid’s birthday party.
I remember wearing it in Toronto in 2009, absurdly underdressed for the cold weather, but it got me back to my hotel. Sleeping in it at the Newark airport when I missed my connection. Vegas karaoke with strangers. The confidence it brought me countless times I didn’t know where I was going.
It fit so many occasions. Going to work, bar hangs, grocery stores, PTA meetings, nature hikes. If you know me you’ve seen me wear it and if you’ve seen me wear it then you’ve seen me.
The jacket solidified my style at the time which was about 63% dressy and 37% casual. My current fashion thinking is fit rules everything. Nothing in the color, material, or pattern matters more than fit and if it fits you, it will look good. As much as I love this jacket, it doesn’t fit anymore.
Despite the dramatic title I’m not throwing it away. I’m donating it to Peak Secondhand, so if you need a new jacket maybe try it on and give it a second life.
Every year I write a recap of things I did and enjoyed. 2017 was packed. I re-read my 2016 recap and there’s a lot of despair, but I’m glad it didn’t slow me down. Maybe it was motivating.
TV / Movies
Twin Peaks: The Return
Silicon Valley
The Leftovers
The Big Sick
Coco
Get Out
Lion
Mother!
The Last Jedi
Logan
Coraline
Manchester and the Sea
Music
The Blow – Brand New Abyss
Beck – Colors
(Sandy) Alex G – Trick
(Sandy) Alex G – Rocket
Fruitbats
This song by the Chromatics
Games
Zelda: Breath of the Wild
HQTrivia
Monument Valley 2
Books
Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth by Buckminster Fuller
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo
Harry Potter and the Sourcerer’s Stone by JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling
The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman
Tigerstar and Sasha by Erin Hunter (at the request of my daughter)
The Runic Warriors by Mickey Wren
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer
Travel
Kyiv – I spent a week in Ukraine! Magento has a huge office in Kyiv and I spent some time there in March working on the new Advanced Reporting feature that was just released in Magento 2.2.2. Kyiv (don’t say Kiev) is a beautiful city and I hope to go back.
Boston, MA – I attended the OpenVisConf in April and it pushed me to complete more dataviz projects this year.
Milwaukee, WI
Antioch, Illinois Falling Water, the Frank Lloyd Wright house near Pittsburgh
Lineage v2
I launched v2 of Lineage, my genealogical data express engine, which I rewrote using D3 v4. It now includes a timeline and a surname categorical view.
I rewrote and added new features in Lineage v2
Magento BI Essentials
In April we launched a new product called Magento BI Essentials, which is a fast, low cost, modern, business intelligence platform for Magento merchants and it’s freaking amazing. It features fast onboarding (15 minutes), low data latency, and powerful data modeling. I’m so proud of the work my team did this year.
Odyssey of the Mind
The Mind Masters won their regional tournament this year and competed at the State Finals. Their skit was about a super hero who was kind of like Aquaman for landfills (he can talk to garbage trucks). I loved it and so did the judges.
Therapy
I started seeing a therapist twice/month for all of 2017 and I highly recommend it. Feel free to reach out if you have questions about it and thanks to all the people who answered mine.
What a year. Every week another beloved celebrity passed away and our electoral system gave us a 2.9 million vote loser as president. People I love voted for a guy who bragged about sexually assaulting women, thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax, and wants to build a registry of muslim Americans.
But her email server…
It’s hard to write about the best movies I saw this year in a world there our next president says the US should “expand its nuclear capabilities“.
It’s hard to talk about interesting work projects when a presidential candidate publicly called on the Russians to hack our politicians and then blamed the white house for not stopping it.
It’s seems trivial to tell you which TV shows I thought were interesting when we’re about to have a president who won’t release his tax returns and won’t properly divest his business interests. We can only assume he’ll use his position to benefit himself and his family.
But let’s do it anyway.
Annihilation was the best book I read in 2016
Books
I read fewer books in 2016 than I have in the past few years.
The New Turing Omnibus by Alexander Dewdney
The Little Big Things by Tom Peters
Annihilation by James Vandermeer
Authority by James Vandermeer
The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck
Running: A Love Story by Jen Miller
Martian Time Slip by Philip K Dick
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Work RJMetrics was acquired last summer by Magento, so I have a new job as the engineering manager for Magento Analytics. It’s essentially the same position I had before, but our team is now improving analytics for the Magento community.
SQL Report Builder
In Q1 of 2016 I worked on a project called the SQL Report Builder, which allows you to build charts directly from SQL queries. I may have built more chart builders than anyone.
Hackathon!
Alex Kleger and I won the first ever Magento Analytics hackathon in November. We created a feature that allows customers to add new data sources without impacting their update times.
Last year I spent NYE in Milwaukee at Quinn and Lindsay’s wedding, I rocked a Pac Man suit at Dan and Jesse’s 80’s wedding, and I watched my beautiful sister get married in Orlando.
Austin
I visited Austin, TX three times to visit the Magento offices there. I can’t tell which I love more, the tacos or the BBQ. Need to gather more evidence.
TV
Westworld was good, but season three of Black Mirror was better than anything else on TV.
Stop Motion Movie
Sasha made this awesome stop motion movie for my birthday
If 2013 was the year I shook up my life, and 2014 was the year I learned how to succeed in it, 2015 was about challenging myself not to accept the easiest trajectory. 2015 was a busy year and it threw interesting things my way. Sometimes that was difficult, even hopeless, but I will never forget you 2015.
It would be shocking to me if I did more than one or two events in 2016, but that’s what I said last year, too.
2. bengarvey’s brain – I created a twitter bot using twitter_ebooks to guess what I’m really thinking about. He tweets about every 9 hours and if you favorite his tweets, he might start bugging you. Some choice tweets:
Interesting points are WWI, WWII, and putting together a swingset.
3. Rocket Booster – I worked on a fun Jetpack Joyride clone with the kids called Rocketbooster. It’s not 100% complete, but it’s fun. It takes forever to load all the game assets, so be patient.
You can play as Sasha or Owen. Collect stars to power your jetpack and get further.
I probably spent more time making the music for Rocketbooster than programming it. All the songs are available here on soundcloud.
4. Work
I’m coming up on 3 years at RJMetrics and just got promoted to Engineering Manager. I wrote cool stuff including our new Data Warehouse Manager, a huge improvement to dashboard sharing, and some crazy tricks to get data out of Amazon Redshift. I also spent an extended tour of duty leading our support team to crush the support queue.
The blue line is our net support queue
5. Work Part 2
I won the RJMetrics chili cook off thanks to the now “award winning” Ben’s Awesome Chipotle Chili.
6. Odyssey of the Mind
I’m coaching Sasha’s Odyssey of the Mind team this year! We just started practicing and it’s been wild.
7. Trello
I’ve been using Trello for years, but now I’m using it for everything including a shared grocery list.
8. The Bentindo Entertainment System
I gave Jake a raspberry pi powered game system for Christmas this year I white-labeled as the Bentindo. This was the image on the back of the box.
Back of the Bentindo box
9. Books I Read
REAMDE by Neal Stephensen
Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen
The Call of Cthulu by HP Lovecraft
Ender’s Game by Orsen Scott Card
The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
What If? by Randall Munroe
The Innovators by Walter Iassacson
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Axe Cop Vol.1 by Malachi Nicole
The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
10. Moves / TV
Interstellar
Master of None
Cosmos
Black Mirror
11. Wine
The Formula Shiraz by Small Gully Wines Incredible
12. Music
Still listening to The Blow’s Paper Television weekly. Ok daily.
My favorite album released this year is Ratatat’s Magnifique
Other albums I enjoyed (not necessarily new)
Bleached’s Ride Your Heart
Bass Drum of Death’s GB City
Lana Del Ray’s Ultraviolence (but wow is it uncomfortable)
Bully’s Feels Like
What I like about 2014 was that it was more about things I built, rather than found and enjoyed.
1. Lineage
How do you browse 250 years of genealogical data? My Aunt Peggy has been doing genealogical research for decades and I created a system to view this data and show family relationships. I demoed Lineage at the February Philly JS Dev Meetup and at the Digital Analytics Association Symposium in October. Lineage screen shot
3. Kids Morning Adventure
I productized the morning routine I invented for getting my kids ready for school. Morning Adventure gamifies the process, motivating kids to be more independent and makes sure we get to school on time. I can’t imagine life without it now. Kids Morning Adventure
4. David Lynch
I got to see David Lynch give a talk at the opening of his art exhibit at PAFA. David Lynch
5. Books I read this year
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Thank You Eliot Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
Diamond Age by Neal Stephensen
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann
Ingenius by Jason Fagone
All the World is Lost by Patrick Hipp
Eloquent Javascript by Marijn Haverbeke
A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin
A Dance with Dragons by George RR Martin
6. Movies / TV
This year I watched and enjoyed
True Detective
The Lego Movie
House of Cards
Regular Show
Wolf of Wall Street
Django Unchained
7. Space Bounce Game
A bunch of us at RJMetrics volunteer to spend time mentoring 8th graders from Philadelphia schools. We built Space Bounce with the kids during our fall session. It uses a great javascript library for making HTML5 games called Phaser. Space Bounce
8. The Report Builder
I spent 2014 at RJMetrics writing the best chart builder in the universe. I’m super proud of what we accomplished and how much we improved the experience of building charts. RJMetrics Report Builder
9. Viz War @ Philly Tech Week
My colleague, Austin Lopez, and I participated in Philly Tech Week’s Data Viz War and we won Best Pro Team for our NCAA tournament visualization. NCAA 2014 Dendrogram
Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of people shook up their lives in 2013. I certainly did. Here are the best things that happened to me in 2013.
1. RJMetrics – In March I started working at RJMetrics, an e-commerce data analytics firm in center city Philadelphia. Leaving Garvey Corp was a difficult decision, but being a developer at of the best SaaS data visualization companies in the world has been amazing. RJMetrics
2. The Bulldog Budget – I worked with Philadelphia City Controller candidate Brett Mandel to implement his vision for the city’s open data future. We built a visualization tool using D3 and MySQL that gives both a high level view of the General Fund budget, but still allows you to drill down to individual transactions. A lot of people got excitedabout it and I think it made an impact in Philadelphia. It also influenced similar projects in Italy and Oakland, California.
Treemap of the Philadelphia General Budget
3. Coffeescript – I was skeptical at first whether Coffeescript was a worthwhile abstraction from Javascript. After 9 months of using it at RJMetrics, I’m a fan. Here’s why:
Cleaner syntax: No parenthesis, braces, or semi colons. The time I save writing console.log instead of console.log(); has been worth the switch.
Improved workflow: Continuously running the Coffeescript to Javascript compiler alerts me of stupid mistakes (ie. ones that won’t even compile) faster than finding them after I’ve loaded the browser.
Existential operator: I can’t count the number of bugs I’ve fixed with one character are due to Coffeescript’s great ? operator, which checks to see if it’s null or undefined before proceeding. For example, if in javascript you previously did this:
if (player != null) {
player.levelUp();
}
In Coffeescript you just write:
player?.levelUp()
Comprehensions: The Coffescript.org docs say you almost never have to write a multiline for loop and they can be replaced by comprehensions. For example:
for (player in players) {
if (player.health < 0) {
player.kill();
}
}
In Coffeescript you can write:
player.kill() for player in players when player.health < 0
I'm looking forward to getting better at Coffeescript in 2014.
4. AngularJS - I don't want to develop another interactive UI without AngularJS.
5. Bought this swingset from craigslist - With the help of my friend Mike and my father in law, we disassembled, packed it up and a U Haul, and reassembled it in my back yard. I'm amazed it went back together so well. swingset
6. Read 13 Books - My morning commute afforded me more reading time. Here's what I did with it.
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
The Trial by Franz Kafka
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nassar
Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
Game of Thones (books 1-3) by George RR Martin
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
9. Spark Program - Some coworkers and I participated in an apprenticeship program for Philadelphia school kids where we spent 2 hours a week with 8th graders interested in programming and computers. Together we built a game!
That's as much as I could remember from 2013. Check out my lists from 2012 and 2011.
Last year I did a loosely types list of all the best things from 2011, and here’s my list for 2012. Not all are new (even to me), but they stood out in 2012.
10. Travel – Saw some great places this year including the Alamo, Niagara Falls, a Phillies spring training game in Clearwater, Spokane, Longwood Gardens, and more.
Sasha looking out over Niagara Falls
9. Reddit.com – I’ve known about reddit for a while, but I’ve grew to appreciate it this year as a general resource for anything. It’s like an improved version of usenet.
8. Found my sunglasses after losing them for months!
6. Dark Sky (iOS App) – Killer weather app for iOS that alerts you when it’s about to start raining and tells you when it will stop.
5. Nate Silver – I saw James Carville along with Dennis Miller give a talk last fall and Carville said this is the year that we’ll see who is better at predicting close elections, traditional polling or the geeks. Nate Silver of 538 predicted just about every election correctly and solidified the position of the newer statistical models.
4. Ruby – Perl was one of my first programming loves, but I’ve used Ruby for 3 or 4 projects this year and have become a convert.
3. AndyD – Hey Tina is my new favorite song. I saw these guys randomly in Jacksonville, FL and they are exactly as the appear in the video.
2. D3.js – I’ve pretty much put on hold my javascript data visualization library, evidensity.js, once I found this amazing library. Mike Bostock does some of the best data visualizations for the New York Times and he open sourced the tools he uses to create them. Amazing stuff.
1. Minecraft – I’ve been meaning to try out Minecraft since it was released as an independent project in 2009, but never got around to it until now. It’s the most innovative game I’ve seen in 20 years and Sasha and I are hooked. It’s a sim / dungeon crawler / FPS shooter / adventure game with retro graphics and high tech terrain generation. The thing that impressed me the most was that if you ventured out to the limits of each generated world it would be about 9.3 million times the surface area of Earth!
Ouch. I just looked up my goals for 2010 and I am NOT doing well. Here’s my progress so far.
1. Read 12 Books – Easily completed this already. A few I listened to using Audible.com and I read the Purple Cow on my iPhone with the Kindle app.
So far I’ve read
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Ed Tufte
Priceless by William Poundstone
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
The Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Start with No by Jim Camp
Born to Run by Chris McDougall
The Road by Corman McCarthy
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
I’m still working on Under the Dome by Stephen King and Envisioning Information by Ed Tufte. Under the Dome is so big I can’t bring it with me when traveling. I’m about halfway through Ghost War, but I don’t know if I’ll finish it. It’s great, but it will take me forever.
2. Run a sub 23 minute 5K – There is no way this is happening this year. I ran one last month and my time was 25:14. I think I can get down to 24:30 in a month and I’m ok with that.
3. Write 5 Songs – Total failure. I really thought I’d be able to do this, but song writing has escaped me this year. I haven’t written a single new song. In fact, I’ve probably only written 2 in the last three years. Sad. I’ve been getting the bug to start playing more, though.
5. Finish my House – Well, I sold it so does that count? It sold in two days, which was awesome.
6. 6 batches of beer – Fail. I have a batch brewing now, but it’s my only 2010 batch.
So I’ve completed 2/6, but really failed at 4. Better luck next year!,
So for future record I’d like to post some personal goals for 2010. I was never into resolutions before, but that was because I had the time to do all the things I wanted to do. Now I have so much going on it is difficult to make time for higher altitude goals, and by higher altitude I just mean more than what I have to get done that day.
1. Read 12 books. I’m a notoriously slow reader, but I have some decent books queued up (The Long Tail, Wisdom of Crowds, Visual Display of Quantitative Information, The Confusion, Under the Dome, Ghost War, and more.) 2. Run a 5K in 23:00 minutes or less. My running has definitely slacked off now that it’s cold, but I’d like to really get my 5K time down about 2 minutes lower than it is now. 3. Write 5 songs. I shelved my music for months after having Sasha and haven’t played anywhere other than the Garvey Gong Show since Owen was born. I should use this downtime to actually write some new material. 4. Finish my house. Sounds impossible, right? There’s always something to be done, but I have a list of things of which, when completed, I’d consider the house finished. It’s part of a larger goal which is to reimplement most of my GTD practices. 5. Brew 6 batches of beer. Had a blast at this year’s BeerCamp and I have to improve my brewing skills if I want a chance at winning next time.
