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At last

February. Finished my PhD dissertation, so can add Dr. in front of my name when ordering a Gatwick Express train ticket. Also makes for a cooler email signature. So far has been the only differences I’ve seen in the year

Work

February-December Started working as a consultant in London, almost the day after delivering the PhD presentation. Not a big cause-effect relationship, though. Have done and learnt a lot of different things since then:

• Learnt how horrible Pig Latin is for MapReduce jobs. Reference Programming Pig
• Learnt lots of ins-and-outs of setting up single machines for services and clusters for machine learning in AWS.
• Improved my knowledge of Spark (which was with the Python API) by learning Scala. Delivered a few small machine learning jobs in Spark/Scala. Can recommend Advanced Analytics with Spark (still reading but liking it a lot so far).
• Wrote some production-level Go for backend services, reviewed a ton more (not the main Go developer). Got a copy of The Go Programming Language in paperback for the kicks, sits side to side with The C Programming Language I’ve had since forever.
• Wrote a ton of production-level Python for backend services (some machine learning related, some data pipeline related, some just service related) and reviewed some little bits (acting as the main Python developer). Skimmed Fluent Python (futures, specially). Will dive into it completely in 2017.
• Learnt to use Docker (and Ansible, even if not directly related) properly.
• Used Apache Kafka (consumers and producers in Go, Scala and Python), Aerospike (in Go and Python) and RabbitMq (in Python)
• Did a lot of fine-tuning of the queries, tables and key distribution of a Redshift (PostgreSQL) cluster (20% space saving).
• Went on a machine cleaning spree on AWS, shutting down (with refactors where needed) or downscaling systems. We saved something like 30-35% of costs doing this.
• Discovered how much I enjoy spinning tops to unfocus a few seconds and clear my mind to tackle a problem.

April-December Worked on some search engine optimisation analysis for a French company. Still ongoing, trying to get a 25% raise in organic search (right now at 10%)

August-December Started working on a personal project: an adserver for this blog, with a multi-armed bandit approach to serve relevant Amazon affiliates product ads. You can read up a little more about it in this post I wrote on LinkedIn.

Life

February-December. Spent 3 weeks out of every 4 in London.

Attended loads of meetups (member of the London Scala User Group, Spark London, London Python… you get the idea), ate loads of pulled pork burgers, duck crackling burgers, pork burgers, etc. Also visited some museums. Cafés in London museums are pretty good.

Also attended several meetups in Barcelona, when I happened to be here (Barcelona Python Meetup, Barcelona Spark Meetup, Golang Barcelona).

Became kind of a regular at the Café at Foyles in Charing Cross (awesome coconut and lime slice) and the Café at Waterstones in Hampstead (best scones I’ve eaten in London).

February Visited Llívia. Lovely small town, will repeat.

February Attended Lineapelle Milano 2016

June Visited Hay-On-Wye, famed by its second-hand bookstores and eggs Benedict. Will repeat. Probably kidnap Jasper Fforde to get him to write Paint by Numbers

July Took a course in wood carving in London. Will repeat.

September Holidays in Collioure. Will repeat

Should have done it sooner

June Learnt to touch type and moved to using the Colemak keyboard layout, practiced at Keybr. Makes a huge difference to speed, accuracy and ergonomy. Should have done this way earlier in my life.

June Started eating parsnip, suggested by our product owner. Never had before, I’m liking it.

September Learnt to prepare brown butter thanks to Ruhlman’s Twenty. Ideal for some desserts, caramel sauces and mashed vegetables.

October Discovered I actually like sweet potatoes, specially as French fries.

Learning

March-June Earned a postgraduate degree on Big Data and Data Science from the University of Barcelona.

February-December Attended the Spark, Emacs, Scala and ScalaX Bytes meetups every time I was in town. More sparingly attended the Data Science London, London Machine Learning, Python London, Go London User Group and Apache Kafka London, among a few other meetups I only attend on a interesting-talk basis.

June Took (as in, finished some) the Coursera courses about Scala. Will finish the rest eventually.

November Attended the Big Data Ldn 2016 and the Amazon Web Services Enterprise Summit London

December Attended Scala Exchange 2016 London and Scala Exchange Hack day, where I got an introduction into contributing to Open Source. Trying to help with scala-native right now. Got a T-shirt with the text Scala contributor, which is nice.

Reading

This year I read 44 books, most of them non-fiction and mostly about self-improvement and data science.

I recommend Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny as fiction and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss as non-fiction. Technical, I’d recommend The Software Craftsman: Professionalism, Pragmatism, Pride by Sandro Mancuso

Music

March-June Enjoyed the hillbilly covers of Hayseed Dixie and almost attended a concert in Canterbury

September-December Discovered Sonata Arctica and really enjoyed its songs. Specially partial to FullMoon and What did you do in the war, dad?

October Attended the Boxes tour concert of The Goo Goo Dolls in London (luckily they played most of the classics)

November Attended the first concert of the Chimera Orchestra in London

December Got these active-noise cancelling earphones for Black Friday. Work wonders to quieten a noisy office.

Gadgetry

Aside from the ANC earphones mentioned above, this year I got

• Mechanical keyboard. Great key feel and travel, but very noisy. Got complaints in the office. Also weights a ton (and a half)
• Portable foldable keyboard. Surprisingly good key feel and shape. Works excellent, aside from being unable to pair to more than 1 device at once.
• Spiraliser. Great for potato spaghetti. Got it in December and only started using it in Christmas, is going to make most of my solid vegetables this 2017
• iPad Pro with Pencil. After trying the Pencil with Procreate in an Apple Store I knew I needed one. Also, this way Laia got a not-too-old iPad Air, too. Got the largest, works great. Then I got an iPhone SE and recently (due to Laia’s Android phone dying for Christmas) an iPhone 7.
• Space pen. I love pens. I thought I was going to give up on notebooks after the Pro and Pencil, but… Always carry this sturdy little beast in my pocket together with the excellent Canson A6 notebook. Its paper can easily take watercolour. Also practicing shorthand on it.
• Memo bottle. I got a very compact backpack (so that I’m not that guy on the tube) and this water bottle fits perfectly when I need to bring water along. A little bit on the pricey, hipstery side but works well.
• External micro USB disk. Oh, I love this thing. Before I used my 1TB external disk for everything (since I have a 128GB Air). Which included all git repositories, meaning that when it was time to leave (or fire drill) I needed to close iTerm, emacs, SourceTree… not anymore. I have it always plugged, effectively doubling my hard drive space.

Weird

Introduced our company into the misteries of the Catalan tradition of the Caga Tió. Brought them one for Christmas.

• Go
• Data
• Python
• Scala
• Maths