What just happened

I think I was supposed to publish the customary 'end of year reflection' post on 31 December, but I got a bit distracted with all the leftover Christmas food. Anyway, here it is, in case you're interested in my 2019.

My year of reading

Last year I noticed quite a few people had kept track of what they read over the 2018, and since I'm someone who has been known to purchase a second copy of a book because I forgot I already had it, that didn't seem like a terrible idea. I was also curious about how many books I actually would read over the year, especially given I felt I was able to read long-form works again after a few years of ...not really doing that well. I was in the middle of about four coding projects at the time, so I ended up making a GitHub repo to use for keeping track of what I've read and what I want to read. It's slightly ironic given my stance on keeping library loan records private/non-existent, but it had a fast payoff, with an offer to lend me a book on my wishlist within the first month.

Over the year I somehow managed to read 27 books (nearly all non-fiction). It was more than I expected, but pretty much bang on my rough goal of one book a fortnight on average. Some are pretty short - like Natasha Lennard's Being numerous or Jeremy Keith's Going offline. Others were very, very long - Sven Beckert's masterful Empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism, for example. It kind of evens out in the end. In my year of reading I connected to the 'new' wave of Australian history - Billy Griffiths' Deep time dreaming and Bruce Pascoe's Dark emu affected me deeply. I discovered that I really appreciate books of essays, particularly by masterful writers like Rebecca Solnit and Natasha Lennard, whose essays are deep and meandering at the same time they are precise and intense. I read a lot about history, about state power, about work, and about algorithms. If you're interested (especially if you're a librarian and professionally interested) in the last topic, I really recommend reading Safiya Noble's Algorithms of oppression and Matthew Reidsma's Masked by trust as a pair: whereas Noble explores the biases of search engines on the open web (specifically Google), Reidsma takes a deep dive into the biases of library search products, which are often touted as a potential solution to the problems identified by Noble.

My year of listening

In the last few years I've become one of those insufferable people who talk about the podcasts they've been listening to. I find they're great on the walk up the hill when I get off my train in the morning, and whilst I'm doing household chores. I've had a few favourites for a while, like Mike Duncan's Revolutions, but in 2019 I really came to appreciate Against the Grain - which is actually a KPFA radio program - and a fairly new podcast called The war on cars which is exactly what you're thinking, and has inspired me to now refer to car parking as 'car storage'.

My year of coding

I spent a fair amount of time coding in 2019 - some new things, and some that was really 'maintenance' (see below).

Technically, I started writing pocketsnack right at the end of 2018, but my first release was in early 2019. This is a command line program that works with the Pocket API to help chronic Pocket-stuffers like me and Alissa, whose despair at the state of her Pocket inspired the project. Essentially, the problem is the same as for email inboxes - once there's enough in there, the sheer amount of unread things overwhelms the brain and we end up paralysed by indecision about where to start. pocketsnack solves this problem by tagging everything 'tor' and then archiving the lot. Then you can 'unarchive' a snack sized number of these 'tbr' articles so that it becomes manageable again. The program is not particularly big, but it's the most complex thing I've written in Python so far, and I learned a lot while I was writing it.

In last year's wrap-up I wrote that I wanted to learn more Bash scripting¹, and pretty early on I got a chance to do something almost as good when I threw an extended and overcomplicated tantrum about having to use Microsoft Word to write meeting agendas and minutes. I also learned how amazing pandoc is. Amazingly, this is the first thing I've ever written for a M