Recap 2019

As we left the year 2019 behind, I wanted to put things together and review a complete cycle around the sun. As always, I consider this is a great opportunity for the future myself. My son Erdem is now 2 years old and he started to rule the house :) now he can declare his thoughts and trying to explore everything. I believe that in 2020 I will have more time with him with greater quality. My wife got my back this year again and with her help and support, I learned too many things, kudos to her!

Side Projects

This year was again a great year for my side projects, I continued to work on gitbatch and tldr++. They are still getting attention and the stars of the projects growing consistently. In addition to these two, I developed another tool; gitin which is a tool that I use every day for my git workflow (git status, git diff, git add and git commit sequence). Since I’ve learned too many things with my early projects, gitin shaped quickly and I developed it with a better understanding of Go. I strongly recommend gitin if you use the command line while using git and you like to do it with an interactive approach. Due to heavy workload in the 2nd half of this year, I couldn’t give enough attention to my side projects but I will be more attached to those in 2nd half of upcoming year :)

Work

This year it has been a big adoption to use Go for new tools and some existing codebase. Since I was evangelizing Go, some of my friends were convinced and they helped me with this transition. For instance, we moved satellite image download software to Go and had great performance improvements. The asynchronous channel communication approach helped me a lot because this software mainly works with CCSDS layers which overlap with OSI layers. The stream is often required synchronization and buffering. The primary focus is on the data link layer with standardized protocols defined by CCSDS. The idiomatic approach of io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces shaped the data flow. I couldn’t imagine this problem is going to be solved this easy. With the straightforward implementation, the maintenance cost and technical debt will be minimal. These are some of the vital aspects for a long-lasting software which will be in production for a decade. There are several projects are being built with Go and satellite image processing software is one of them. Since this is a fully distributed system, it’s a little bit complicated to describe in a single paragraph, I will spare your time this time.

Travel

This year I traveled to Changchun, a city is located northeast of China. I attended to a meeting about the data sharing policy between member states of the APSCO (Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization). I had the opportunity to visit CGSTL which is a successful company for deploying constellations into orbit in a very short amount of time. Luckily they allowed me to walk around and let me in the satellite integration zones. It was a little bit odd to see near mass production of satellites, but this is China, what would you expect differently :) In 2018 when I visited Istanbul, I couldn’t manage to visit some of the coffee shops in my list but this year I almost completed the list. I can happily provide a route for a coffee tour in Istanbul.

Philosophy

I want to add this topic for a year recap this year. Since I am very curious about philosophy from now on I would like to review this topic as well. In the year 2018, I paid attention to the history of philosophy to understand how human thinking evolved and tried to understand who thought what. In 2019, I mainly focused on utilitarianism and populism subjects. Utilitarianism is a set of ethical theories that mainly focuses on maximizing the happiness of an individual. The roots of this ethics trace to hedonism doctrine but it is actually improved by philosophers like John Stuart Mill, Peter Singer, etc. The latter subject, populism, was also an interesting topic for me. Since we are living in a world with leaders like Trump, Putin, Erdogan, etc. this was one of the important topics to understand. I am still reading some books about post-truth and it is tied to populism in many aspects. I have some thoughts and resolutions on these subjects but I don’t want to state them here as rhetoric but I would be very happy if anyone wants to discuss so that we can test our thoughts.

Walking

This year my friends and I continued to walk but we lost a member of the crew because he moved to Germany. I have a very good time with this routine and we discuss a lot of topics from computer games to theology. I am planning to continue this tradition in the upcoming decade.

As always, I would like to hear your thoughts about this post. If you want to share with me, you can find me on twitter.