OT: Your accomplishments in 2013 and plans for 2014

[Craig Dillabaugh]

On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 09:21:46 UTC, monarch_dodra 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, 11 December 2013 at 19:45:25 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic 
> wrote:
>> As for my future plans, I'm hoping to land myself a nice
>> programming-related job next year. I've never had a 
>> programming job,
>> most of the paid work I ever did was physical work, such as 
>> drilling
>> through bricks, rock, concrete, installing and repairing air
>> conditioners, installing central heating systems, lighting and
>> electrical work, and stuff like that.
>
> I'm actually baffled to hear that someone of your caliber has 
> is not a professional programmer. Passion and theory alone will 
> only get you so far... (IMO).
>
> So, I hope you land yourself that job.
>
clip

Andrej is like Matt Damon's character in "Good Will Hunting" 
(hopefully without all the psychological issues).  Good luck in 
the job hunt.

I am sort of the Anti-Andrej. My big accomplishment for 2013 was 
to complete my Ph.D. in Computer Science (after many years), but 
I am actually not a fantastic programmer.  My degree is in 
'theoretical' computer science, a number of the profs in my 
research group would likely have been happy to do all their work 
with just paper and pencils.  I kept asking my supervisor to let 
me do some implementation project as part of my research, but he 
kept answering "No, it will take too long".  Finally, a reviewer 
for one of our papers said the only way he would except it was if 
we included 'experimental results'. So I got to implement 
something, and of course I used D!

Considering I have a BES and M.Sc. in Geography, and no extensive 
math background, I figure getting a Ph.D. in CS is a bit of a 
coup on my part.

With that out of the way my goal for 2014 is to improve as a 
programmer and hopefully start making some contributions to the D 
community.  I actually started making some small documentation 
corrections to various D projects this past year, and want to 
work my way up to something more substantial.

Congratulations to all the new parents out there.

Cheers,
Craig