2015: A Year in Review

With 2015 wrapping up and 2016 ahead of us, I find it important to look back on what happened over the course of the year and set goals for how I’d like my work to develop over the coming year.

I’m not going to enumerate the events of the past year, because they’ve already been discussed in various sections of my blog. I would like to take a moment to highlight some of my favorite experiences, along with those which I consider most valuable to my development as a researcher and engineer.

When I did this last year, I differentiated between events in my personal life, academic life, and industry life. I am not going to do that this year, as I feel that while I may have done less overall most of the accomplishments that I’m most proud of this year are focused around a central theme: my Ph.D. thesis work, declarative edge computation, functional programming, and a little project I’ve been involved in called Lasp.

Here we go.

• I was the recipient of a fellowship in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate program in Distributed Computing and will begin my Ph.D. in 2016 co-advised by Peter Van Roy and Rodrigo Rodrigues, with an amazing committee featuring Peter Alvaro and Seif Haridi.
• I was lucky enough to be able to speak about my work on Lasp at some major events such as Erlang Factory 2015, Strange Loop 2015, Code Mesh 2015, RICON 2015 and GOTO Chicago 2015.
• I made a draft of my thesis proposal available and published an article on how databases may be the wrong abstraction as we move towards edge computation.
• I participated on the Eurosys 2015, DEBS 2015 and Erlang Workshop 2015 program committees.
• Following from my Papers We Love talk in 2014, I achieved a Papers We Love “hat trick” with two talks in 2015: one in Paris and one in San Francisco.
• I was featured on the Functional Geekery podcast talking about Lasp and functional programming.
• I had my first conference publication with Lasp at PPDP 2015.
• Lasp also appeared at PaPoC 2015, W-PSDS 2015, Erlang Workshop 2015 and will appear at OBT 2016 and EdgeCom 2016 in January.
• I travelled to Paris and Berlin to speak about Riak and Webmachine.
• I left Basho and started working at Machine Zone.
• I moved to San Francisco, CA.

Goals for the next year? It boils down to two major professional goals:

• Survive a move to Belgium.
• Successfully change from a 15 year career in industry to a student in academic in a Ph.D. programme.

Wish me luck!