Summary 2006
December 9th, 2006 at 10:10 amThe yearly summary comes a bit earlier than usual because on Wednesday we’re taking off to Australia and New Zealand for a 3 month vacation, and I won’t post anything in this blog until we come back (circa March 14th-15th). Instead, Anna and I will post impressions and photos together in our Travel Log.
Professional
Just like 2005, this was a productive year with a lot of “first time”s for me.
* First time doing real board design. Granted, the card is not too complicated, but it contains a lot of technologies we haven’t used before, which means a first step into deep water. I’m very pleased that it came out working on the first try.
* Coded a very complex FPGA – my most complex ever.
* First time writing real embedded software (in C). Two different programs with an interface between them – having designed the complete communication protocol. This experience amplfies my conviction that I have found the niche of the profession which I like most – embedded engineering.
* First time leading a multi-disciplinary team of people, building a full product from scratch. Although I admit there’s a certain feeling of accomplishment in this, I can’t say I enjoyed the management part of my job. Managing people just isn’t interesting for me, and as a result I don’t think I’m good at it, which brings my enjoyment of the job further down.
* Funnily, my bosses disagree with the previous statement. They seem to think I’m doing a good job as a manager. I got terrific scores in the review this year, and also received a couple of prizes (bonuses) for good work.
* On the educational front, I started learning Ruby and liked the language a lot. So I decided to do my rewrite of ESMS (to version 4) in Ruby, and already started it, although it will be many long months until it is completed. Ruby is an excellent language, with the power of Perl, but cleaner and better suited for large projects – just what I have been looking for.
* Additionally, I spent my newly gained free time (which now wasn’t dedicated to IBM work) to learn a lot about programming languages and techniques, especially about the various Lisps. In some way, I feel I’ve overdone it – I spent too much time reading programming forums, newsgroups, Reddit, Joel, Digg and others, instead of really coding. I’m not very pleased this this and I want to improve in this area.
* Unfortunately, I made no progress with my Jamca chess project.
* I migrated the blog to a paid hosting on my own domain, powered by Wordpress. On my way I learned just enough PHP and CSS do hack the website a little. Although I can’t say I think PHP is a good programming language, its instant integration with HTML does make it very simple to use.
Reading
As usual, this is a list of books I completed in 2006, sorted chronologically. The language I read the book in is English, unless specified otherwise in parens after the author’s name.
1. “Perl best practices” by Damian Conway
2. “Guns, germs and steel” by Jared Diamond
3. “The kite runner” by Khaled Hosseini
4. “The catcher in the rye” by J. D. Salinger
5. “The selfish gene” by Richard Dawkins
6. “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf
7. “Queen Margot” by Alexandre Dumas (Spa)
8. “The Russians” by Hedrick Smith
9. “The seven daughters of Eve” by Brian Sykes
10. “Test driven development by example”, Kent Beck
11. “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi
12. “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak (Rus)
13. “Programming Ruby, 2nd Ed.” by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
14. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis (Spa)
15. “The picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
16. “The mists of Avalon” by Marion Zimmer Bradley
17. “The Ruby way” by Hal Fulton
18. “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert
19. “Thinking strategically” by A. Dixit and B. Nalebuff (Heb)
20. “If there’s heaven” by Ron Leshem (Heb)
21. “Journey to the center of the earth” by Jules Verne (Spa)
22. “Collapse” by Jared Diamond
23. “Crime and punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Rus)
24. “The world is flat” by Thomas L. Friedman
25. “Australia and NZ on a shoestring” by Lonely Planet
26. “Broca’s brain” by Carl Sagan
27. “Best of Ruby Quiz” by James Gray
28. “Capitalism, an unknown ideal” by Ayn Rand
29. “El maestro de esgrima” by Arturo Pérez Reverte (Spa)
30. “Higher Order Perl” by Mark Jason Dominus
31. “The hunchback of Notre-Dame” by Victor Hugo
32. “Inside the Aquarium” by Victor Suvorov (Rus)
33. “In a sunburned country” by Bill Bryson
34. “Russian Debutante’s Handbook” by Gary Shteyngart (Heb)
35. “Out of control” by Kevin Kelly
36. “Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions” by Dave Roth
37. “Genome” by Matt Ridley
38. “Hackers’ tales” by Dr K
39. “The Dante club” by Matthew Pearl
40. “Animal farm” by George Orwell
41. “Nine princes in Amber” by Roger Zelazny
42. “Triple your reading speed” by Wade Cutler
43. “How the mind works” by Steven Pinker
44. “Blue Latitudes” by Tony Horwitz
45. “Lonely planet: Tramping in New Zealand” by Jim DuFresne
46. “RTL Hardware design using VHDL” by Pong P. Chu
47. “Call of the wild” by Jack London
48. “One for the road” by Tony Horwitz
49. “The Son Of The Wolf” by Jack London
50. “Objectivism: The philosophy of Ayn Rand” by Leonard Peikoff
51. “Straying from the flock” by Alexander Elder
52. “The last of the Mohicans” by John Fenimore Cooper *
53. “Pompeii” by Robert Harris *
Well, it’s not the amazing 61 of 2005, but 53 is a good accomplishment taking into account that my yearly goal is to read more than 50 and there are still 3 weeks left until the end of 2006. The language blend this year is 3 in Russian, 3 in Hebrew, 4 in Spanish and 43 in English. The trend in the beginning of the year was non-fiction and Spanish, and towards the end of the year I turned mostly to travel books about Australia and New Zealand, and shorter classics in English.
(*) No review written for these books, since I finished them shortly before the flight.
My favorite technical book of the year is “Higher order Perl”. The favorite non-fiction is “Guns, germs and steel” and the favorite fiction is “If there’s heaven” (surprisingly, a Hebrew book taking the top !).
Review of goals for 2006
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