There's a long tradition with online journals (I've never really liked the term "blogging") of reflecting on the old year before starting fresh with the new. So as it's new year, why not eh... shall we dance?
The family are all well - thanks for asking - and we've done a lot of renovation work to the house. Work-wise I put Phi Digital on hiatus and since April have been working with a gaming startup. We're still in stealth but the title is CTO, but being small that actually means more like dev/dev-ops/cleaner/sysadmin/tea-lady/cto/... you know how it goes. We have a distributed team so remote working is the norm. Oh yes, and lots of JavaScript; some of it even fun.
Talking of JavaScript (and fun) I set out last year to properly understand the platform. As part of that endeavour I took on the task of understanding how JavaScript compilers work, and wrote a four-part series of articles about this for CreativeJS. The research was fascinating; and it still amazes me how such a dynamic language can be made to run so fast. The series seemed to go down well. JS Weekly picked it up and from there it landed on the front page of Hacker News (which was nice). That was a first for me and quite an experience, but in the end the servers stayed up and the trolls were kind.
Following on from the uber-techie approach I came at JavaScript from a different angle. I put a talk together for Worthing Digital where I traced the history of the JavaScript eco-system from browser validation through to Node, JSON and hardware hacking. Crucially I wanted this to be an approachable, non-technical talk, and again it seemed to go down well.
The last couple of months I've spent getting up to speed with cloud computing by gradually moving all my hosting from Media Temple over to GreenQloud. There's a lot to understand along the way as I'm effectively moving from managed web hosting to full stack cloud hosting. I'll write more about this later but for my next project I want to write a series of articles explaining how to make this transition.
Lastly, I made a few changes to The Computus Engine during the move. I finally merged in all my crashposition posts from way back when so that all my online ramblings are at least in one place. When I get some time I'll re-do the theme and some of the structure but for now I'm running the default Wordpress TwentyFourteen theme.
Look forward to catching up with all of you in the year to come. Happy trails, John D.
