2009, Year in Review
2009 has been an insanely awesome year for me, this is a bit of a summary.
My Thesis
I finished my thesis this year. It’s basically a massive Java application designed to read someone’s writing and judge how they feel about various named entities in a film review, e.g., actors, directors, the film itself. I was comparing my approach against other papers that attempt to apply a thumbs-up, or thumbs-down rating to a given film review, using only its language.
That diagram shows how the various pieces of my thesis fit together. As I said though, it’s probably best described as a big honking Java application. Here’s a graph of the film “The Mod Squad”, as analyzed by my program:
My Job
In September I started work at FreshBooks, “The Leader in Online Invoicing”. 
It is pretty much my dream job, a-hip-young-startup-environment — fringe benefits include, foosball, free beer, and semi-monthly cakes. Making the transition from Java/C++/C# development, to more PHP and Python development has certainly been interesting, but it has been helped along by working with a lot of really great coders. I’m starting to improve on some skills that I really felt I needed to, e.g., Unix sys-admin licks, working with legacy code, modern JavaScript techniques.
My Hobbies
My two main hobbies are music and climbing; 2009 has been a great year for both.
I got to see the Pixies in August, which was a dream come true. I saw countless other bands at various bars and venues throughout the year, but Virgin Festival was definitely the high-point.
As for hobby #2, I went climbing in Squamish, which was absolutely beautiful, and built a DIY climbing wall which has been great for training. Also on the climbing front, I’ve been going to Joe Rockhead’s in Toronto. It’s a great climbing gym — and their bouldering problems seem to keep me in my place.
My Game
If you haven’t seen my game HackWars, geez, what’s wrong with you? 2009 has been the year of open source, with the help of some of our great players we have rolled out more updates for HackWars in the last few months than I think any previous year. It has been really exciting to watch. My role in the game has been significantly different than it used to be, I provide a bit of coding help on the weekends, but we have been leaving a lot of the conceptual steering of the game to our awesome player base.
My House
I bought a condo this year in what is, I assume affectionately, referred to by other Torontonians as Scarberia (Scarborough, Ontario). I’m right on the subway line and, being a relatively new citizen of Toronto, have been taking in the various sights, sounds, and yes, smells throughout the city.
The World of Tomorrow
2009 has been a great year for me, and I’m looking forward to continuing to kick butt in 2010. So all I can say to you 2010 is bring it on, I’m ready for you.
