Mathias Jean Johansen
2015 in Review
This post is simply a reminder to myself of all the great things that have happened during 2015.
Highlights
- In many ways, 2015 was a year of JavaScript to me. I visited my first conference, ReactEurope, and went to a React hackathon at the Mozilla office in Paris. In addition, I spent countless hours learning Flow, and implementing it into our existing code base at work. I also familiarized myself with the wonders of Babel, and ECMAScript 2015, and I learned to apply, and appreciate the ideas behind JSON schemas.
- I submitted, and successfully defended my bachelor’s thesis. This is possibly the most challenging work I’ve accomplished so far. It is an implementation of a lazy, functional programming language which can be executed on two, separate stack machines that perform lazy evaluation using two different strategies. It consists of a compiler written in OCaml, and the aforementioned stack machines written in C. The source code is available on GitHub, although sufficient documentation is still severely lacking.
Books read
Compared to 2014, I’ve read far fewer books in 2015 than I wanted to both in terms of fiction, and technical books. In 2016, I hope to delve into Tropic of Capricorn, Flaubert, and ideally also SICP which has been on my to-read list since the beginning of 2014. These are the books I completed in 2015 in chronological order:
- Simon Reynolds: Rip it Up and Start Again
- Charles Bukowski: Ham on Rye
- Simon L. Peyton Jones: The Implementation Of Functional Programming Languages
- Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy
- Gabriel García Márquez: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
- William S. Burroughs: Junky
- Miran Lipovača: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
Favorite records of the year
I’ve listed my favorite records of the year for quite some years now. This year is no different.
- Julia Holter: Have You In My Wilderness
- Horsebeach: II
- Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear
- Jim O’Rourke: Simple Songs
- Mark McGuire: Beyond Belief
- Beach House: Depression Cherry
- Gun Outfit: Dream All Over
- James Blackshaw: Summoning Suns
- Loren Connors: Blues: The Dark Paintings of “Mark Rothko”
- The Necks: Vertigo
I have a slight feeling that 2016 will include working with Relay, and GraphQL. If time permits it, it would be interesting to dabble in Rust, Idris, Racket, and Elixir, or even notably older programming languages as Prolog, and Forth.
Hopefully, I’ll have more time to practice music too, and perhaps travel a bit as well. I’d also be fun to revisit my bachelor’s thesis, and refine the language. I might give an update on the state of affairs next year. We’ll see.
Here’s to 2016!