The Best of 2012 - Looking Back

The year 2012 was a bit different for me in terms of readings and enlightenment. While once again Scala proved to be the most dominant language that I used throughout the year, I also had some serious productive time and mind share to learning machine learning and related topics. Online courses at Coursera were of immense help in this regard and proved to be the catalyst of inspiration. Being in India, staying within the comfort zones of my happy home, I could attend the classes of professors like Daphne Koller, Martin Odersky and Geoffrey Hinton. Thanks a lot Coursera for this enlightening experience ..

online courses that I attended ..

• Probabilistic Graphical Models (Daphne Koller)
• Functional Programming Principles in Scala (Martin Odersky)
• Neural Networks in Machine Learning (Geoffrey Hinton)

the best of the papers that I read ..

I usually read lots of papers on my subjects of interest. The total number are too many to list here. But here are a few of them, mostly from the domain of programming languages and type theory. In this regard I must confess that I am not a programming language theory person. But I sincerely believe that you need to know some theory to make sense of its implementation. That's the reason I think programmers (yes. serious programmers using a decent programming language with a static type system) will do better to learn a bit of category theory.

As I mentioned at the beginning, currently my programming language of choice is Scala and I have been exploring how to write better code with Scala's multi-paradigm capabilities. Though I tend to use the functional power of Scala more than its object oriented features, there are quite a few idioms that I use where I find its object oriented capabilities useful. Scala 2.10 will now be released any time and I am even more excited to try out many of the new features that it will offer.

Ok .. here are some of the papers that I enjoyed reading in 2012 ..

• An Introduction to Programming and Proving with Dependent Types in Coq - Adam Chlipala
• Theorems for free! - Philip Wadler
• Totality - Conor McBride
• Proofs are Programs: 19th Century Logic and 21st Century Computing - Philip Wadler
• Data types à la carte - Wouter Swierstra
• Agda-curious?: an exploration of programming with dependent types - Conor McBride
• Ideal Hash Trees - Phil Bagwell

a few good books ..

This is also a different list that what I expected at the beginning of the year. It's mostly due to my focus on machine learning and AI related topics that I took up in course of my journey.

• Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference - Judea Pearl
• Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques - Daphne Koller
• A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein - Palle Yourgrau
• Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition - Christopher M. Bishop
• Turing (A Novel about Computation) - Christos H. Papadimitriou
• Practical Foundations for Programming Languages - Robert Harper (Read the freely available ebook)
• Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming (3rd Edition) - Simon Thompson

3 conferences in a year - my best so far ..

This was my second consecutive PhillyETE and I spoke on functional approach to domain modeling. In case you missed it earlier, here's the presentation up on slideshare. I combined my PhillyETE trip with a trip to London to attend ScalaDays 2012. It was a great experience listening to 3 keynotes by Guy Steele, Simon Peyton Jones and Martin Odersky. I also got to meet a number of my friends on Twitter who rock the Scala community .. it was so nice getting to know the faces behind the twitter handles. Later in the year I also spoke at QCon NY on the topic of domain modeling in the functional world.

One of the conferences that I plan to attend in 2013 is The Strange Loop. It has been one of the awesomest conferences so far and I hate to be tracking it only on Twitter every year. Keeping fingers crossed ..

some plans for 2013 (Not Resolutions though!)

In no specific order ..

• Do more Haskell - Haskell is surely in for some big renaissance. I just spent a couple of hours of very productive time watching Edward Kmett explain his new lens library.
• Continue Scala - obviously .. needs no explanation ..
• Explore more of machine learning and work on at least one concrete project. I am now reading 2 solid books on ML theory - as I mentioned above I feel a bit uncomfortable learning implementations without any of the theory that drive them. While both of these books assume a solid background of mathematics and statistics (which I don't have), I am trying to crawl through them, greedily accumulating necessary math background as much as I can. Wish I could take a sabbatical leave for 1 year and finish both of them.

Guess that's all .. See you all on the other side of 2013. Happy holidays and have a gorgeous 2013.