Another year comes to an end and tradition demands that I write a recap for the year. But it doesn’t require that I write a very good one.

I wish I had the time and energy to write one of those recaps that captures the essence of the year in a thoughtful insightful manner. The best I can muster is “a lot of stuff happened.”

Here, look at this picture of my tiny kids playing chess.

chess

Personal

This has been a great year for me. My son started first grade, and much to our relief, he loves it. At home, he started to learn to program. I even had my first conversation with him about refactoring and the DRY principle. Parents, it’s never too early to talk to your kids about clean code!

My daughter just gets more and more interesting and fun to be around. She has a big personality and just wins over any room she’s in. Sometimes we take walks together and she’s now able to walk with me over a mile to the local frozen yogurt place. But she usually makes me carry her part of the way back.

And I finished my second year at GitHub. After a year and a half solely focused on GitHub for Windows, I’ve been able to bounce around a few other cool projects which keeps me excited every day. I still love working here.

I spoke at a few conferences, but I’ve certainly ramped that down as travel is tough on the family and I had a tiny bit more work travel this year.

Work

Contribution graphs are not a great way to determine the impact you’ve had in a year. They don’t capture a lot of important work that happens outside of GitHub. Yes, it’s true. Productive work does happen that’s not captured by a Git commit.

Even so, I find them interesting to look at for some historical perspective. The gaps in a contribution graph tell as much a story as the areas that are filled in. For example, you can see when I go on vacation based on my graphs, though I’m not very good at staying away from the computer when I do.

Here’s two of my contribution graphs. The first one is what I see as it shows contributions to both public and private repositories.

Haacked Contribution Graph

The second one shows what the public sees. This is perhaps a decent, though not perfect, representation of the work I’ve done with open source.

Haacked public Contribution Graph

As you can see, after shipping a major release of GitHub for Windows, I shifted my focus to some open source projects like choosealicense.com and octokit.net, making my public contribution graph much greener in the latter half of the year.

What I wrote, that people seemed to like

My three most popular posts written in 2013 according to Google Analytics are:

  1. Death to the if statement - more robust code with less control structures with 25,987 page views.
  2. Argue well by losing - You only learn something when you lose an argument with 21,264 views.
  3. Test Better - How developers should become better testers with 15,618 views

By the way, does anyone know how to easily do a report in Google Analytics for content created in a year? I’d find that useful.

What I’ve Shipped

This past year, I’ve had the pleasure to be involved in shipping the following:

  1. GitHub Enterprise support in GitHub for Windows
  2. Octokit.net
  3. ChooseALicense.com
  4. RestSharp - a few releases actually.
  5. According to FitBit, I had 4,577,481 steps this year. That’s approximately 2,099 miles. Compare this to the 3.1 million steps I took the year before. That’s a huge improvement!

You People

Yeah, let’s talk about you. You people are my favorite. Well, most of you.

  • Visitors 1,462,003 unique visitors made 2,091,606 visits. Those numbers are down 24.9% and 22.27% respectively from the previous year. I’d like to blame the death of blogging, but I suspect the quality of my writing has declined as I’ve focused more on other areas of my life.

  • RSS Subscribers According to FeedBurner, there are still 84,377 subscribers to my RSS feed which is surprising given the demise of Google Reader. I guess everybody found replacements. Or the stats are jacked.

Next Year

I’m looking forward to 2014. I’ve started learning F# by reading the Real-World Functional Programming book by Tomas Petricek and Jon Skeet. I’m hoping to incorporate more functional programming into my toolset. And I’m hoping to take even more steps.

Hopefully I can speak at a few conferences again this year. I’d love to speak in some new places. I’m really hoping to get a gig in South Korea this year. It’d be a chance to see how the industry is really growing there and to visit some of my family.