2014 Highlights

The projects and events stand out the most to me from throughout this past year were:

• Starting my new gig as a Twilio Developer Evangelist in January
• Open sourcing CFPB's collab project that I worked on in 2012 and early 2013
• Contributing the Twilio module to Ansible along with blog posts and speaking engagements
• Working with the SmartAmerica SCALE team and going to the White House to wrap up
• Heading back to the WH for Disaster Recovery Demo Day to demo the Rapid Response Kit
• Growing Full Stack Python's audience from ~500 to ~15,000 uniques a month
• Coding the Underwear, Plushcap and Choose Your Own Adventure Presentations projects
• Hacking on some damn fun projects with Lauren Orsini, such as my fish just texted me, build your own Yo app clone and the Flickr MMS drinking game for ReadWrite
• Presenting with a experienced peer speaker, Kate Heddleston at DjangoCon US, which raised my game on that talk way higher than I ever could've done by myself
• Speaking and/or doing workshops at EuroPython, DjangoCon US, SF Django, AnsibleFest, DC Configuration Management, Women Who Code DC and many more

Codifying My Teaching Style

Throughout the year I tested a hypothesis I came up with in 2013 regarding content creation, speaking and coding. The hypothesis was that by focusing my efforts on interrelated activities ("synergy" for you MBA folks), I would get better results and feel less scattershot in my work output.

I told the Twilio Developer Evangelism team about this approach and Rob Spectre dubbed it the "Makai Triumvirate". Below is a picture representing what the approach looks like.

When activities are related I can produce much greater output in coding, writing and talks than if I worked on several varying topics in parallel.

A good example of this triumvirate approach is the work I did this year with Ansible.

• Coded Ansible playbooks to deploy existing Python web applications
• Programmed Underwear library to learn more about Ansible's code base
• Coded the Twilio module in Python
• Got the pull request accepted into the Ansible 1.6 release
• Wrote the Ansible Twilio module blog post
• Spoke about Ansible at SF Django, Center for Open Science, DC Configuration Management, AnsibleFest NYC and NoVA Python
• Wrote about Ansible on the Configuration Management page for Full Stack Python

From the list above it's evident that much of the work I did revolved around coding followed by writing and speaking after gaining experience with the library.

After that work in the first six months of the year I relaxed my focus on Ansible. I still use the project all the time for deployments but I moved on to other topics for coding, speaking and writing.

The triumvirate approach sounds like common sense. However, when you're asked by a conference organizer to come up with a technical talk, it's easy to get excited by a new but unrelated topic and try to create a talk around that new thing. This focused approach allows me to say "what are the 3 big things I will work on this year?" and cut out anything else that is unrelated.

Open Source

Open source was a much bigger part of my professional life in 2014 than in any previous year.

The above image shows my my daily open source GitHub contributions through December 25 of 2014. I came up with the idea to push an open source commit as many days as possible throughout the year. Currently I'm at 282 days in a row with my last miss on March 18 (I was up in NYC with our Twilio crew so I missed that day by accident).

Overall I should end up having missed 3 days out of 365 this year. I'm happy with that streak. It's possible I'll commit less in 2015 but I haven't set a hard target on my goals after Dec 31 just yet.

Writing

I didn't write a lot on this site since I had a lot going on with Full Stack Python and external websites. Here's a quick list of my blog posts from throughout 2014.

• Driving Demand for Full Stack Developers on O'Reilly Radar

Via the Twilio blog I wrote:

• Introducing Developer Evangelist Matt Makai
• Ansible Text Message Notifications with Twilio SMS
• How To Set Up GitHub Activity SMS Alerts
• Website SMS Alerts with the Plushcap Python Package: Part 1
• Branded MMS Coupon Generation with Python and Twilio
• Choose Your Own Adventure Presentations with Reveal.js, Python and WebSockets
• The Non-Coder’s Guide For Running the Twilio.org Rapid Response Kit

Lauren Orsini did the writing for the following three articles but we hacked on code together to produce these articles for ReadWrite:

• My Fish Just Texted Me
• Friday Fun: Build A Drinking Game With Twilio MMS And Flickr API
• Create Your Own Obnoxiously Simple Messaging App Just Like Yo

That's a Wrap

I'm happy with how 2014 turned out from a software development standpoint. Much of my time is spent writing and speaking as well as coding which is fine by me since I no longer have to worry about the constant billable hour pressures of being a consultant.

2015 is already shaping up as a killer year. I'll have a separate blog post later on my plans for the new year.