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Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#41

I got my first job in the tech industry after leaving hospitality. It was the most difficult and most rewarding thing I've done in my career.

Congrats!I can imagine. I'm currently trying to get a job and its quite challenging

Networking is what got me this job. I am admittedly lucky that the network I built was as well connected as it was. Now that I'm in I'm just making sure I keep up. So much to learn. I love it.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#42
post #11
post #2

Wrote a book (non-technical). A very interesting experience indeed. I used LeanPub for the content and then CreateSpace for the deadtree version.

Super cool! Would love to hear more about your self-publishing experience -- mind if I shoot you an email?

Sorry for the delay. I generally abstain from HN over the weekends.

Feel free to email me, there are several addresses in my profile entry. I reply fastest to the GMail one.

I really should blog about my experience of writing a book. Some parts were easier than I expected, while others were about as hard as I expected. All together, I think with the facilities available through services like LeanPub and CreateSpace, it was easier and smoother than I initially expected.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#43
What I did in 2014

I travelled to China (Hangzhou), Thailand (Phuket), Sardinia, Berlin and Copenhagen for both work and leisure.

I presented my Master thesis and the associated poster to the VLDB '14 conference in China (major Big Data conference).

I also presented at PyData and two more local meetups on Big Data topics, including PostgreSQL.

I wrote a paid tech report on Big Data.

I contributed python code to three open source projects: OpenBazaar, TimeManager, Doge Terminal (:P)

I learned Scala, Ansible, PostgreSQL and PostGIS, better OOP Python, Guava, better testing, better bash, better javascript, Vagrant, vim, better git.

I understand the steps involved in setting up very complex systems and system adminstration a lot better now.

I worked on some personal projects in Python and javascript, the most important of which were a web scraper to search for flats in Switzerland, an online regex tester and a tool that uses the last.fm API to return statistics about users

I also tried my hand at CoffeeScript and configured a chat bot (Hubot) to optimize chatting with my boyfriend.

I amassed a big collection of cookie cutters for any occasion (even 3D ones) and baked cookies for my friends.

I read at least 3 proper books in German and improved my vocabulary.

Also read more than 5 programming books to improve my craft, and a lot of fiction (also some in a non-Western context which was very eye opening) and some non-fiction on economics, politics, poverty, women's issues and math.

I went to three job interviews but ended up choosing to stay at my current job. Valuable experiences, nevertheless, which made me learn more things about interviewing and negotiating which kindof contradict the popular advice one can find online.

I produced more than 10 data reports for customers all over the world.

Re: Ask HN: What have you accomplished in 2014?

#44
post #11
post #2

Wrote a book (non-technical). A very interesting experience indeed. I used LeanPub for the content and then CreateSpace for the deadtree version.

Super cool! Would love to hear more about your self-publishing experience -- mind if I shoot you an email?

Sorry for the second reply, but I have written a blog entry on my book writing experience. It ended up larger than I expected, yet still doesn't exhaust all that I would want to say, so more may follow.

http://simonpeter.org/mechanics-of-writing-a-book/

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