Year in review, aka what did I ship in 2015

What did I ship (or help ship) in 2015?

(I did this a few years ago, and then became an employee.  Though it is probably even more important to think about what you ship as an employee, when I am a contractor it is easier to publicize it.)

• Rewrote my farm share directory to support multiple states, numerous bugfixes and a new feature to let folks add reviews.
• Sent seven newsletters for said farm share directory.
• An email course to educate consumers about farm shares.
• Helped take a video to structured data project from failure to success.  I was brought in as a senior engineer to a team and helped with porting an admin app from one environment to another, reviewed and fixed python program which took video and generated images, managing datasets for training, writing java microservices around C libraries, documenting processes, and coordinating with an overseas team as needed.
• Set up secor to pull logging from kafka to s3, as well as setting up java processes to log to kafka.
• Helped integrate Activiti into a custom workflow engine, and promoted a test first culture on the team I worked with.
• Dropped in and helped troubleshoot an e-commerce system with which I was totally unfamiliar during an emergency.
• Learned enough ruby on rails and Stripe to add an online order form to an existing Heroku website.
• Helped build a backend system to monitor phone and car locations to prevent texting and driving.  My role on this small team varied between devops, java development, QA, code review, defining process and documentation.
• Installed and tuned an elk stack used for business intelligence and developer debugging.
• Took my wife’s writing and turned it into a book (best surprise ever).
• Wrote 34 blog posts.

Of course, there were other personal milestones too, like camping with the kiddos, getting solar installed, road trips, and date nights with the wife.  All in all, a great year.  Here’s to 2016.