I am a little behind on my 2018 review, seeing that its almost mid Jan already. But better late than never, so here goes
VR
2018 continued to be a year of tremendous education professionally. For a big part of the year I continued to work in the VR space, specifically using A-Frame and WebVR. I am definitely a fan of WebVR and I really do believe that the app model that is prevalent in the mobile ecosystems is a bad idea for VR. I completely agree with the vision of VR being a web of experiences, and the web technology stack has matured to a point where deploying a VR experience is trivial. Hopefully more people will take up building VR experiences in JavaScript and WebVR. What the community really needs is a diversity of ideas and to grow VR beyond its early base of gamers.
While it was a lot of fun, I am looking at other things beyond VR this year and am excited for certain new ideas I am playing with. Will share more on that later.
Blockchains
I did a fair bit of work on Blockchains in 2018, mostly at the Dapp level. Its early days for this space but I do believe they present a once in a generation opportunity for a step function change in how we use technology. There is a lot of pessimism about the space right now, after the unrealistic craziness that was the 2018 bubble when Bitcoin hit $19,000 but I am excited about where the tech is going.
I spoke at a panel at the Coinvention Conference on the Philly Blockchain scene (Thanks Mike) as well as at the inaugural session of the Drexel Blockchain club (Thanks Adit)
Besides these, I did work on a LOT of JavaScript and Rails which has been pretty rewarding and learned a lot about Google’s cloud infrastructure, specially Firebase. I need to distill a lot of that into a future blogpost
Reading
I did a fair bit of reading this year but I did abandon a lot of books halfway. I am trying to be okay with that rather than pushing through a bad book, just to complete it. I wish there was a better app than Goodreads for books though
Misc
Some other things that happened this year:
- Philly Google Developer Group (GDG) continues to go strong in its 8th (!) year since its start as AndroidPhilly in 2011. Its a great community that I look forward to meeting at least once a month and have made some great friends there.
- I didn’t travel as much for work this year, which was good. My favorite event though was the MIT Media Lab’s Fall Member Event. I do like all the demos that the Media Labs groups present but the best part is the talks with other sponsors from different organizations.
- I worked with a lot of interns and co-ops this year, mostly from Drexel, and I loved it. These guys and girls are smart, enthusiastic and I find conversations with them refreshing since they question a lot of assumptions I often have. Maybe I should consider some work in academia 😉
2019 is guaranteed to be a year of many changes and I am excited for most of them. Stay tuned.
Code Zen 