2016 Review

It's another year-in-review post! I'm not really sure why I keep doing these, but I guess everyone does so why not?

Best New Technology Learned

I wrote a rambling post about how I was cautiously optimistic about GraphQL shortly after it was released. This year I finally took it for a spin on a project at work, and so far I've been very impressed. We are using Apollo as our GraphQL client, and it too has been a real treat. I hope to dive into this a bit more in a future post, but these two technologies have taken a lot of the pain out of writing network APIs and building isomorphic/universal web apps.

In other news, I spent some time learning the basics of Haskell, which was certainly a mind-bending experience. Rather than becoming a proficient Haskell programmer, I wanted to become more conversant about higher-level functional programming concepts. This year I might try dipping into OCaml or its new variant Reason to further my journey.

Open Source

I didn't make many open source contributions this year, but two projects of mine did get some love. Envalid, my environment variable validation library, got a complete rewrite to a much saner API. apollo-local-query is a new, tiny library to make server rendering with the aforementioned Apollo a bit easier.

I don't have any specific goals for open source this year, but I do have a skunkworks project that I revisit every couple of months. Maybe this year I'll sharpen it into a more "serious" project.

Best Books

Of the ~40 books I read this year there were five standouts. I don't generally read new non-programming books so I was surprised that three of them were actually released in 2016.

This Blog

My investment in this blog was basically non-existent in 2016, and I'm ok with that. Till next time!