A recap of things that I’ve discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2015 in no particular order old or new.

Reading and videos on software

• 40 NPM Modules We Can’t Live Without - an excellent collection of very hepful node package modules.
• Functional Composition - a gentle introduction in composing and create higher order functions.
• Functors, Applicatives, And Monads In Pictures - more functional programming goodness in pictures.
• 10 Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read(At Least Twice) - a breadth of information that is useful from a computer science perspective.
• TPL and async/await Best Practices for the Busy Developer - A comprehensive guide to understanding and utilizing the C# task parallel library.
• What Is Functional Programming - Understanding what makes languages functional.
• Which Programming Languages Are Functional - Understanding what languages are actually functional.
• Using Lists with Entity Framework - Necessary if your working with EF complex types.

• [Build 2015

  Channel 9 Service Fabric Session](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015?sort=sequential&direction=desc&term=Service+Fabric#theSessions) - Researching the new service fabric distributed systems for work.

• Volatility-Based Decomposition - a coworker introduced me to Juval Lowy’s software architecture design, worth the watch.

Programming languages I’ve hacked on last year

JavaScript, FSharp, Go

Programming languages used for work-related projects last year

CSharp, JavaScript, FSharp, TypeScript

Programming languages that I hope to explore this year

• Idris - Just picked up Type Driven Development in Idris!
• Go - I explored GO a while back, but now a fellow software engineer acquaintance wishes to do some projects in go.
• F# - Honestly I’ve been playing with F# for the past eight months, and I hope to do more open source contributions this year.

Papers discovered (and read)

• In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm - Actually read this a while back, but is a worthy of mention here for those that wish to understand the internals of distributed systems without losing their mind.
• Managing Technical Debt with the SQALE Method - excellent read on how to analyze and quantify your teams technical debt.

Community efforts

• CharlestonJS - I’ve recently taken over as head of the CharlestonJS meetup group, this couldn’t be possible without the help of The Iron Yard - Charleston
• CODETalks 2015 - My presentation of Juval Lowry’s volatility based decomposition. This was a great experience and I hope to be back again in the future.
• Charleston Teck Slack - I joined what’s possibly the best thing to happen to the Charleston tech scene.

Music discovered

• Mulatu Astaqe - Ethiopian music is amazing! Check it out!

Games discovered

• The Long Dark - I’ve been playing survival games for a bit, and this one honestly captures the extreme pressures of surviving in the wilderness.

Etc

• Andres Bees - I’ve become an amatuer beekeeping and decided to start a blog to track my progress and learn from my mistakes.

Plans for 2016

• Contribute to the visual Fsharp power tools.
• Write some type providers in Fsharp.
• Write some Go.
• Discover some new music.
• Play guitar more.
• Play my berimbau more.

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