Written by Matthew Bilyeu
on 

2015 Review

Professionally, I grew a lot in 2015. I started working at RJMetrics in April 2014. It was my first experience at a start-up, and my first real foray into writing software for the web. The shift in workplace culture and technology I experienced that first year made me excited and anxious. I was learning new stuff at a fast clip, and I'm happy to say that in 2015 that rate of learning didn't slow down.

In 2015 I made the jump from mostly front-end development to a mixture of front- and back-end. I finally started learning Clojure and functional programming.

I still do front-end work, and I've become someone that other members of the team come to with AngularJS questions. I feel more comfortable with Sass and styling than I did at first, and I'm more familiar with Gulp and our other front-end tooling. I'm looking forward to playing with Angular2, and maybe even ClojureScript and/or React down the line.

Over a few weeks in my downtime I built a single page app using Angular. Tumblr Top gives users a quick visual overview of a Tumblr blog's top original content.

 

Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 8.34.52 PM

  

Screen Shot 2016-01-06 at 8.35.37 PM

 

This was fun because it was my first Angular app from scratch, my first experience with Material Design, and the first project I put on my public GitHub account.

It took me a while to pick up Clojure. I'd only ever done imperative programming, and I initially found Lisp syntax intimidating and confusing. And there was so much vocabulary. Arity, records, multimethods, monads, macros, etc.

There was a chicken/egg situation where I wanted to work on a Clojure project to learn the language, and I needed to learn the language to work on a Clojure project. Slowly, I began edging into it. Outside of work I did 4clojure problems, occasionally visited Clojure for the Brave and True, and began reading The Joy of Clojure (which I gave up and then later picked up again).

I did get a chance to use Clojure heavily at work--it came near the end of the year when my team was tasked to design and implement a notification system. In short, this new service allows for end-users to receive notifications about actionable errors throughout the system. The various microservices publish some event messages about their state, and the notification service consumes those messages, sending the proper email and/or in-app notifications. Making the new service robust, scalable, extensible, and idempotent was challenging, but it was probably the most important professional experience I had in 2015. The project is nearly done, but I finally feel comfortable with Clojure. I'm excited to continue using this beautiful and expressive language.

Over the summer I gave a presentation at work about the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. I enjoyed researching this topic and thinking about ways that our microservices could make use of an event bus and the pub/sub pattern.

Our production infrastructure at work is largely on AWS. This year, mostly due to my role on the notification project, I got a lot of exposure to this DevOpsy side of things. The notification pub/sub system employs SNS and SQS in a fanout topology, where message producers publish to an SNS topic. That topic fans out to one or more SQS queues, which consumers then read from. I touched other parts of AWS, too--OpsWorks and CloudWatch come to mind.

In general, I feel more comfortable at work in terms of the environment and my place within the company. I also feel more confident in my abilities.

The coming year looks promising. I want to increase my focus on my hobbies. I want to learn more about Clojure and use it in a personal project (maybe something with machine learning?)

PS: A few weeks ago I started using Taskwarrior to keep a todo list at the command line, and it's helped my focus at work tremendously.

Outside of work, in 2015 I: