As the year comes to a close, I would like to take a moment to reflect on 2015. Looking back, it will mostly be remembered as the year I dealt with depression and self-esteem issues. Other than the endeavour to conquer my inner demons, I made a couple of new friends and acquaintances, lost some, burnt some bridges, built new ones, discovered new pastimes and grew out of some old ones. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a very fruitful year as I wished it would be.

Nevertheless, here are some of the great things that I discovered, learned, read, etc. No particular ordering is implied unless specifically stated so.

Great technical blog posts read

• Learn to Code: It’s Harder Than You Think
• Letter to a Young Haskell Enthusiast
• Early vs Beginning Coders
• Visualizing Algorithms
• (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
• The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
• Advanced Programming Languages

Great non-technical blog posts read

• Losing Sight
• Lies We Tell Kids
• Advice on Gifted Education
• Education Mithridatism
• What You’ll Wish You’d Known
• Recovering from Chronic Depression

Favorite non-technical books read

• The Queen’s Gambit
• Letters From Burma

Favorite technical books read

• On Intelligence
• The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge
• Think Complexity: Complexity Science and Computational Modeling

Number of Books read

A bunch

Number of papers read

3

New TV series discovered

• Limitless
• The Mentalist

Programming Languages Dabbled with

In descending order of time spent with it,

• JavaScript, Java, OCaml, Standard ML, Kotlin, Python (wow, I barely touched Python at all this year)

Languages that I wish to explore more

• Prolog, Clojure

Plans for 2016

• Read more, especially the technical books that have been on my to-read list forever
• Refreshen up my Algorithm skills
• Learn to appreciate art, paintings in particular
• Make an effort to publish my reflections and essays on my blog

New Year Resolutions

• Learn to embrace the uncomfortable
• Learn more mathematics and theory.
• Be more mindful in general

Here is to a new year, where hopefully good things will betide.