Another year passes by. Here is a quick summary of my professional and academic 2016.
Work
It was a year of a lot of change at work. The make up of the team I work in changed dramatically as we rethought how a corporate labs group should operate. I worked on 2 big projects this year, one exploring the world of bots and messaging platforms and the other around Virtual Reality. The VR project was a great showcase piece which meant a lot of demos at various locations. As used to VR as I have become, its still great to see new people experience it for the first time.
I did a lot more work-travel this year than the previous year (which is saying something) VR on the Lot and Re:Code were probably my 2 most memorable trips, the former at the Paramount Studios Lot and the latter where I demoed our VR app to a few bigwigs in the tech world.
Education
I took a 3 months-ish bootcamp on Entrepreneurship organized by Philly Startup Leaders. It was really educational and I learnt quite a bit on quantitative competition analysis, business model generation etc with talks (and homework) by some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Philadelphia. It was also great to meet some people with a strong “makers streak” in them.
I also spent a couple of weeks at Microsoft (Redmond) learning to code for the Hololens system at their Hololens Academy. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve some time out next year actually do some apps for it.
The other technology I continue to academically investigate is Blockchains and Bitcoin. I am such a fan of the system and its potential to revolutionize the internet. I seem to be having a “I see Blockchains needed everywhere” phase. I started coding some Blockchain based apps this year but didn’t get too far. Hopefully next year I have something to show there.
I also participated in the RET program with UPenn working with teachers from local high schools and PhD graduate students.
Code
I started 2016 working a lot in Swift 2 as we scrambled to finish an iOS app around iOT and bots. We finished that project around March and spent the rest of the year at work mostly in Unity and C#. I have grown to like that system a lot which reminds me of my early years in Flash where creativity and design was so integrated into the engineering process, not the design/developer dichotomy we seem to have drifted back into today with mobile or web apps.
On personal projects I continued to build some Android apps (stay tuned for that in 2017) and learnt enough Ruby on Rails to consider myself fairly proficient at it now.
Android Philly
The Android Philly group I run is still going strong and with a lot of familiar faces there, it has really become a community I enjoy being a part of. One of the big reasons has been the #androidphilly Slack channel on the PhillyDev Slack account that we all connect in in between events.
Talks
I also gave a couple of talks at AndroidPhilly, two at the Coding Bootcamp we organized early this year and one later on building Bot-based apps. I also gave a talk at a Women I Cable Technologies event on VR and a couple of other internal work events.
Patents
I was issued a patent grant on a method for pairing devices this year and another was published on image based group creation. Some others around VR are being moved forward as well, so thats cool.
Books:
The free library continued my reading addiction. Here is what I read this year:
Code Zen 
