2015 was a year of completely missed plans and that was equally true when it came to reading. I read even fewer books than a year before, but at least I am happy with my picks. There were no complete duds and I liked almost all of them.

We bought a Kindle Voyager before our 3 months journey, but I did not read enough on it to form a definite opinion. I prefer to read programming books on tablet, but for everything else Kindle feels better. Paper still works best for me unless I want to make notes.

I have started an experiment of marking interesting parts and bookmarking them with Post-It bookmarks so I can return and transcribe them once I have finished the book. It is definitely more work than just sliding a finger across screen, but I am curious to see how this turns out.

As always unaffiliated links point to Amazon and are there only for those that are at least fine. I did not provide a link for The Trial because my copy doesn't have one and I am not familiar with any of the many available editions. Bold is reserved for those I found best: Missing Person, Poor Economics and The Arab of the Future.

• The Trial by Franz Kafka. I expected to like this book more than I did. It didn't help that (old?) Slovenian translation sounds often very germanic and that it isn't finished. Dialog is often odd and it is unlikely you'll find brilliant stylistic passages, but it may win you over with pervasive mood of desperation, alienation and impotence (absolutely not sexual).
• DIY Toolkit by Nesta. A good introduction on various tools and techniques NGOs can you use for better results in their work. Most of which will be familiar to UX practitioners and some of which would benefit from a deeper introduction.
• Missing Person by Patrick Modiano. The kind of multi-layered books I would write if I had talent and more depth. A noirish pursuit of lost identity that is also an engaging exploration of self. Highly recommended.
• Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. Started reading after I learned about Terry's death to console myself. It worked and the book lost none of its charm since I last read it.
• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Absolutely fantastic book that everyone with even slight interest in international aid should read. I wish I had a copy of it with me at all times so I could throw it at anyone feeling the urge to pontificate on failings of the poor.
• The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. Last Discworld book, the only series I ever read. It was difficult to read about death of a character I liked for almost two decades. Terry died before he finished polishing text and it shows. It is not among his great, but it is a decent finish at a difficult time.
• The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf. A controversial portrait of author's early childhood in Libya, France and Syria full of humor, humanism and barbed observations that may not be to everyone's liking. But they were to mine.
• Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration by Brian Fitzpatrick & Ben Collins-Sussman. Book with some useful advice that for me did not live up to its praise as I found most of it obvious or out of scope. I got really annoyed by its common use of female pronouns in negative contexts which is especially annoying in so male-dominated industry and its reliance on personal opinions where there has been ample research (e.g. open spaces).

This year will be busy, but I would still like to pick up the pace and read at least 15. Hopefully some of them will be fiction, but mostly I will read to learn and not for pleasure.

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Happy new year everyone!

I still don't know what to think of 2015. Probably won't until enough time has passed. It certainly was completely unlike what I expected and planned, but at least it significantly improved in its last month.

I have spent about a third of last year travelling. Work took me to India, Tajikistan and Bolivia. It was physically demanding, especially Tajikistan, where dry climate and poor sanitation led to weeks of diarrhoea that dried me like a raisin, confirmed that I am indeed in no way an equestrian person and culminating in my first visit to a doctor on my travels. Not only did I not "salvage summer" as I hoped, I spent most of autumn recovering from exhaustion.

Still, even though trips were though and mostly not as successful as we expected, I am glad I got to do them. It was a tremendous learning experience and we met and worked with some amazing people (and some decidedly less so). As much as I enjoy field work, I don't expect to do it in 2016.

My family spent a lot of time in hospitals and I with them. Any time is really too much, but at least I can solace myself with good outcomes. Still, it would be great if none of us entered one next year.

There is no need to go through the list of things I planned a year ago as I did none of them. Life intervened, but I also did not use first half of the year as well as I should. However last couple of months were great. Reader still lives only in my head, but I did finally rewrite image-diet which is now called image-diet2 and is in pretty much everything better than previous version.

I did not learn a new programming language and doubt I will next year, but I did start learning Spanish. Little I know was already useful in Bolivia and by the end of the year I'd like to read a book in Spanish (which I did not manage to pull off this year). I do plan to deepen my knowledge of Python3, ES2015 and ES2016 now that I have more opportunity to use them.

It was a tumultuous year and yet I feel calmer than ever which I mostly attribute to TM. It is difficult to judge its other effects on me as they are clearly not as pronounced, but feeling more peaceful even under stressful circumstances makes meditating worthwhile enough for me.

I do not know what to expect of 2016, but it feels seminal. The image stuck in my head for last couple of days was my first week at university. Totally clueless and wrong about where life will take me, but knowing it will be different afterwards. In a way this year feels like one of last opportunities to easily redefine who I want to be.

The biggest change next year will be professional. I have happily worked for Aptivate for four years and hope to continue doing so in the future, but not solely. I will be available for freelance work. Talk to me if you will need help from someone with my background.

Another goal for this year is to present a talk at a conference as I haven't done that in a while. "Competition" for slots at interesting ones is strong enough that giving even one will be a success.

Other than that I am trying too avoid being too ambitious with my plans as I expect this year to be busy as it is. I plan to do a homeconf once per quarter and read more than I did this year. I will write publicly more as it would be difficult to write less and I am again not bereft of things to share (although most of them are not ready yet).

I finally hacked Mark's journal script to fit my needs. I can now summon it at any time and commit new entry without switching applications. My plan is mainly to jot down non-obvious problems and solutions I encounter, but I'd love to hear what others write in their work journals.

Spending few hours each month on tooling seems sensible. I have rejigged my set up late last year and difference is palpable. Development takes less effort with better results. Removing friction from doing the right thing is already a win, but if I can make it easier than doing wrong things, then that's golden.

In any case I have few firm plans for next year. Getting freelancing off the ground and presenting at conference should keep me busy enough. I expect to be overworked at least some of the time and yet it's been a while since I have felt so optimistic. Let's see how it goes.

I like going to conferences as I find them a really good way to get introduced to a bunch of topics I don't know enough about. For various reasons I only went to two this year. Instead I have collected links to talks I was interested in. However I really dislike watching presentations on my computer, so I haven't seen any of them until recently. I never get nearly as much out of them as when I listen in a dimly lit conference room.

Hence I recently tried to replicate conference experience at home. I have downloaded the talks¹ and dedicated a full day to watching them. It was brilliant. I especially liked:

• that I could focus very much as I can at conferences
• it is cheap and comfortable as I don't need to travel farther than our living room
• line-up perfectly matched my interests
• I could skip uninteresting talks easily without wasting time
• that speakers would wait for me in mid-sentence if necessary when I needed more time

However not everything is better and there are aspects I have missed:

• not all interesting talks are publicly available
• discussions about talks or ideas provoked by talks with other attendees
• (ab)using power of pausing talks may interfere with your uptake as it can fragment talk's narrative
• meeting new people (which as an introvert I don't do much anyway)

Of these I miss discussions the most. Fry recently came up with a cool idea of starting a (video) talk "book club". The idea, which obviously needs a better name, is to meet fortnightly or so and have a discussion around talk everyone agreed to listen beforehand. It seems like a well balanced proposal to me, but I am curious to hear what others think about. Who would be interested in?

1. What's the benefit that couldn't be solved differently of publishing videos on public website but preventing their download? ↩