Farewell 2018

It’s been a quite busy year. And I think a summary of 2018 would be nice to keep things together. Recap is a good opportunity to log what you’ve done for a year loop. Before starting I would like to thank my wife for her great support throughout the year. At the time of writing this our son is 14 months old and he is growing like the speed of a rocket. A lot of things to tell about him but it is a topic of another story. So here we go.

Travel

First, I’ve been in Izmir for a conference presentation. It is a beautiful city in Turkey’s west coast. The conference was on studies of signal processing and applications. Me and my colleague prepared a study on application of dynamic time warping technique on satellite imagery to achieve fast band registration operation. Other friends from my office were there too, so we had great time for 3 days.
Right after Izmir, I’ve been to Beijing China for a meeting coordinated by APSCO(Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization). We have reviewed the requirements and the project plan of Data Sharing Service Platform Phase Two. It is a great project and as a consequence it is an opportunity for member states to exchange their satellite imagery. To be honest, I was not expecting Beijing to be a city that you can enjoy too much. It exceeded my expectations and we had great time after the meeting. Here is a photo that I took while visiting the Great Wall.
china
In the middle of summer we visited Istanbul for wedding of my friends Selim and Mine. We took the opportunity and visited some historic landmarks that we never seen before. Also, in Istanbul there are many coffee shops to have a good cup of coffee. We visited some of them but couldn’t manage to visit all of the shops on our list. Next time I plan to spare more time for coffee shops.

Istanbul
This year while we were visiting the hometown of my wife, we also decided to visit Gaziantep for a gastronomy tour. It was always a dream for me to visit there for just “eating”. Also, we have visited the Zeugma Mosaic Museum which was very interesting for me. The foods in Gaziantep were so delicious and I guess I gained approximately 1kg after that visit.

Work

This year, the project I currently work on had several milestones and we have successfully managed to complete our tasks. We finalized the preliminary designs and prepare the interface documents of our subsystem. We squeeze in two extensive project review meetings and had no major problems. To achieve this we worked as a team and it is an outcome of devotion. There are a lot of work to do in 2019 so that we can finish our software and test it before the satellite sent to orbit in late 2020. I hope this year I can find much more time to gather some writings about our software design.
Also, I evangelize Linux to my colleagues and I convinced at least 5-6 of my friends this year to use Linux as their main operating system for development. With this I cross over again on basic concepts of Unix operating systems in order to assist them while they migrate to Linux.

Side Projects

At the beginning of this year I was planning to buy a used car and I decided to use my software skills to classify car adverts in sahibinden.com. The project was far bigger than I thought and at some point I quit working on it. Fortunately I learned Scrapy framework for website scraping and had a lot of fun while reading the adverts. It was very hard to understand those adverts moreover I would teach computer to understand.
After some time I started to think about learning something new. But I haven’t got an idea to work on. Some time around November I decided to do a script that run git pull command for all of my git repositories. But my requirements were a little complex for a single script so I decided to create a tool that fits into my needs. I was always planning to do something with Go therefore I choose Go as programming language of my brand new side project. I named it as “gitbatch” which seemed relevant for the capability of the app. The project can be found on github. It took attention from the community and became the most trending project written with Go at the end of 2018. I was not expecting this level of impact and it made me very happy. No doubt I will continue to improve it in 2019.

screen
While developing gitbatch, an idea come into my mind to create a helper tool for Unix commands. There is a project called tldr, It is a community driven project to simplfy man pages and give a few examples of usage of a command. And there are many clients to use those information with command line interface. I developed a fully featured interactive client named tldr++ and it also become the most popular client in only 10 days. It is even more popular than tldr’s official client.
It was a very successful year for my side projects and I am very happy to play with Go and love the Go community. I would like to thank my friend Fatih Arslan for his support too.

Walking

Not surprisingly year 2018 is no different than 2017 or 2016 in terms of my daily walking activity. Since February 2016 I am walking at least ~6 kilometers per day. Sometimes it can climb up to 10 kilometers. Since my office is located in Middle East Technical University, it is a great opportunity for walks. Here are some nature photos that I occasionally come across.
metu
I would like to hear your thoughts about this post. If you want to share with me, you can find me on twitter.