Nothing like a bulleted list to make you feel good about your year. But seriously—I wanted to get one more item on the blog before the calendar turns and reviewing my year seems like a good way to close out 2017.

In the past I was required to write out a list of accomplishments twice a year for performance evaluations. Every time I did that I ended up writing thousands of words and I was surprised by the number of large accomplishments that I somehow completely forgot about.

This was a big year; lots of important events I don’t want to forget. I accomplished a ton, I had a huge life change in the form of a new job, and my best friends got married. Some specifics:

• Took a class on algorithms and data structures
• Took a class on statistical learning techniques
• Took a class on modern machine learning tools
• Open-sourced some image processing code
• Celebrated my dad’s 60th birthday in Snowbird
• Served as best man for Steven’s and Dustin’s wedding
• Met Christina’s friends and family in Ohio
• Watched my good friend Bri get married
• Bought a new car
• Sold the car I’ve had for 15 years
• Before I moved on from my job at NTIA, I:
  • Led a project to develop a signal processing engine
  • Facilitated a massive crowdsourcing test, possibly the largest MRT to date (150,000 trials!)
  • Planned a long-term research project on IoT radio-frequency interference issues
  • Contributed to a five year research plan in the areas of audio and video quality
  • Sysadmin on like, so many machines
  • Served as the main point of contact for a Colorado School of Mines capstone project
  • Contributed to a survey document on the state of encryption technologies (!)
  • Contributed to two NTIA technical documents
• Attended delicious popup dinners at MCA Denver
• Saw the moon darken the sun
• Celebrated my 34th birthday a couple times
• Settled into a new job with the title “Computer Vision and Machine Learning Scientist”
  • Wrote code to analyze fields of crops and extract useful information
  • Designed and built a GIS and image processing pipeline
  • Sysadmin on like, one machine
  • Other stuff too
• Saw some epic concerts
• Hiked a fair amount (and apparently grew my hair really long)
• Posted more than 320 dailies (a new record!)

I know there are things that I left out—and maybe I’ll update this later—but it was nice to spend some time reflecting on the year and reaping some returns on the investment I’ve made in recording what happens most days for the eighth year running.