2017 was a good year for this blog. I had a bit more space to write this year, and am happy with the result.

This post highlights some of the best posts of the year and talks about what to expect next year.

Top Posts

This blog brought in 36,676 unique pageviews over the year. Nothing to write home about but also not too bad.

The most popular posts were the following (in descending order):

  1. Do We Need GraphQL?
  2. Embracing Functional Programming in Ruby
  3. Visualizing a Job Search or: How to Find a Job as a Software Engineer
  4. Deletability
  5. Building a Briefcase that Deploys Code

I find it interesting that my most popular post is Do We Need GraphQL? The inevitability of Facebook’s open-source continues to march forward. This year also brought the dropping of the PATENTS file, which helps their efforts. My own thoughts toward GraphQL have been changing recently as well, and I will probably revisit this hot take some time in 2018.

Best of all, each of these posts was a lot of fun to write. This blog is a selfish endeavor, so I’m happy that some folks enjoy reading what I write.

Technology Stack

Although it’s never been covered, some folks might find it interesting as to how this blog is built from a technical perspective. There are also a few new things this year.

This blog is:

If this sounds interesting at all, happy to go into more depth.

The Year Ahead

2018 has about as much buildup as a new Star Wars movie. Politically, the world is divided. Economically, too. These politics and economics have an interesting intersection here in San Francisco.

The area generates a good chunk of the country’s wealth, yet almost 1 in 100 citizens in San Francisco are homeless. Were it not for “Greyhound Therapy,”1 that number would be nearly 1 in 50. Although I know next to nothing about such things, these figures are far past the point where they can be responsibly ignored.

There are also several interesting new mediums to explore. I’m currently hashing out a short-run podcast. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.

Every year I also ask myself: Should the Cult of Less be revived? This was a project I had done about a decade ago. Everything I owned was posted online for anyone in the world to buy. Just about everything sold, and the project received worldwide attention after the BBC picked it up.

The Cult of Less was one of my few projects that had a life of its own. Once it caught on, it exploded. Just as quickly, it came back down to reality. Its 15 minutes of fame were complete. Part of me feels like I had lit a match, only to watch it slowly burn out rather than set it to kindling.

These are just a few musings as to what the year might bring. As always, thanks for reading!

What Would You Like to See?

If there’s anything that you’d like to see here, don’t hesitate to drop me an email or @-me.

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  1. Pejorative term used to describe the practice of buying one-way tickets for a person who is homeless in a city. ↩