Brilliant on BoochTek, LLC

2015 Year in Review

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 23:28:38 +0000

It’s that time of year again — time for a retrospective on how I did on my goals for the year. I had 5 main goals for 2015:

Job Hunting
Conferences
Blogging
Programming Language Design
Writing an Agile Book

Job Hunting

I got pretty lucky on this one. My main contract with Mercy got extended several times. Amos and I must have been doing a good job of keeping the customer happy. We even made it through a couple rounds of layoffs. I’m wrapping up the gig at Mercy now. I’m working one day a week there, as the project winds down.

Resolutions

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 23:42:13 +0000

January kept me pretty busy, so I’m a little late to this. But better late than never. And as an Agile practitioner, I don’t think personal retrospectives should be limited to one time of year.

Review of 2014

Last year I wrote a blog entry listing my goals for 2014. As far as New Year’s resolutions go, I was relatively successful — about 50% of my goals accomplished. Unfortunately, my Open Source contributions weren’t as strong as I had hoped; while I released some of my own work, I didn’t do much else. I did increase my blogging; getting in on a weekly blogging pact helped immensely. I also increased my participation on the This Agile Life podcast to a level that I’m happy with. But the accomplishment I’m most proud of was giving a presentation at RubyConf.

Brilliant – My Very Own Programming Language

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 23:25:38 +0000

I’ve decided to design and implement my own programming language, and call it Brilliant.

I’ve been interested in programming languages and linguistics almost as long as I’ve been using computers. I’ve long thought that if I ever go back to college, it’s likely that I’ll concentrate on programming languages as a specialty.

My recent discovery and involvement with the Crystal programming language has gotten me excited about new language ideas. It’s also helped me realize that implementing a language myself is feasible, and that there’s no better time to start than now.