Year in review

• I started using a Gaiwan for my looseleaf tea drinking, and am never going back.
• I meditated for the first time, and it works for me. Spent about 18 hours doing it, using Headspace.
• I left my job of 8+ years at Mapbox and started a new one, at Observable.
• I moved from Washington, DC to San Francisco.
• I wrote 46 blog posts this year. By the numbers, readership is pretty similar to 2014 and 2015 levels: around 200k views by 100k people.
• I didn’t start any big new open source projects, but spent time growing my existing ones and clearing the decks for new commitments.
• I’ll meet my 12-book reading goal by just a hair. Next year I might set an upper bound for the page count so that a book like Nixonland doesn’t consume months of my time. Or, I might become a faster reader.
• I bought a computer for the first time ever - a refurbished 13” non-touchbar MacBook Pro. It’s perfectly fine.
• I started caring for some trees and it’s been excellent, a complement to watercoloring and sketching as a way to counterbalance pixels and screens.
• I traveled a bit - Seattle, Cuba, Ashland, Charlottesville, Atlanta. It felt like a relatively light travel year because I didn’t include many work trips, and my new job is just us three, all in SF.
• I finally understand Ableton Live enough to use it, and I also feel fairly comfortable writing in the Clojure and Elm languages.
• I took more steps toward adapting to the new bad internet, like owning more of my data, reducing my dependency on the AppAmaGooBookSoft, and upping my security habits. A few big ones remain: I still use Gmail, I still buy from Amazon.

I’m not one for resolutions - they don’t seem to work, and I can’t guess what I’ll be interested in a few months down the line. I do want to finally win a bounty on HackerOne, be comfortable using Blender, and hit my running goal next year. And a million other things. I have some projects in the works that I’ll blog in early 2018 - experimental, non-useful stuff. It’ll be good to get back in the zone of being able to ship stuff without as much commitment or worry.