The human brain urges to wrap a single narrative around periods in the past. But 2019 is a year of many stories for me. Let me share some of them with you here.

2019 in my life

I'd like to keep this one brief here: since the birth of my fist daughter (I have two: 4 and 2 years old), this was the first year that I felt life was actually a little bit easier than it was the year before. My work load still peaked, my social life is still at a crawling pace and my cultural intake is bare-bone on the best of days. But there was a tiny bit of extra room for everything this year. And that helped make this year be a lot more pleasant than the last one.

That being said, there is a massive backlog in many areas of my life, and simply catching up on all of that anytime (let alone anytime soon) is probably not realistic.

2019 in the world

I'm sure you know where this is going... Source: Deal or no Deal show.

As far as I could tell, living in the UK this year was the year of screaming politics, like the previous two. With a general election and never ending Brexit Deal/No-Deal drama, our nerves were tested to an extended stretch. And yet in the UK I also sense that people are getting exhausted by politics (more on that on my 2020 post later).

It was also a year where reality frequently failed to neatly line up with people's wishful thinking (e.g., Brexit will be reversed, the crypto world will boom). Many of us didn't want Boris Johnson to win the general election, and similarly many of us wouldn't want Donald Trump to win the next election in the US. But although we can play our little parts and stride for the causes we support, it doesn't mean at all that reality will bend to our will. I think it's as important to handle bad outcomes with wit and diligence, as it is to try and make good ones happen.

2019 on social media

TikTok was a flop... source: Axiom.com

At the start of the year I decided that I wanted to be more social on the internet, and be an early adopter on one or two platforms. I was frustrated with Facebook's filtered world, and Twitter's mile-long feed, and it was only Reddit where I could browse and write comfortably.

So I got myself an Instagram account, but thought it worked very poorly as a social media platform. I also tried TikTok, but was already scared by the sheer tedium of having to record videos on an occasional basis. But during the spring and summer I noticed Coil, and saw that the platform was making progress, so I started blogging here in August.

Quite a few posts have accumulated since then, so let me give you a few highlights here. On programming, I think the strongest three of general interest were probably these:

• Small Sims 7 – Modelling an election: the correctness of this tutorial has now been validated with the UK General Election 2019, where the Conservatives took 60% of the seats with 44% of the vote ;).

• Game World 6 – Starting your own Town 2: An open soruce walking environment monetized with Coil. This will be the starting point of much more in 2020.

• Game World 1 – Making a custom animated globe: it's a shame the PIL library import in repl.it is currently not working, but I think this tutorial is one of my favorites. It's very generic and re-usable for many purposes, but also fitted really well as a start for this series.

And outside of the programming topic, I think these are probably the nicest to look back on:

• The list of microscopic office crimes 1 and 2: a lot of my colleagues, both inside and outside of academia, responded with clear recognition of their sins, so I suppose I was not alone ;).
• My first year on the internet: This was my favorite from the Blast of the Past series. It used to be subscriber only, but especially for this review I made it public now.
• Report on the aftermath of an extreme election and conference week: the general election had a very big impact on our lives and my workweek was ridiculous in that period. However, it really helped to blog a bit during it.. #CoilTherapy

Thanks to the blog I enjoy using Twitter and Facebook much more now, using my blog posts to foster some new discussions. As for TikTok and Instagram...I suppose they don't fit my social media taste very well.

Closing thoughts

2019 was a decent year for me. I hope you'll enjoy the tail end of it! For subscribers I'll share a few last very short findings from the year.

Oh, and I will select an end of year song.... but I haven't picked it yet! (I'll update this post when I do).

Credits

The header image is a picture of a taxi in Addis Abeba, taken in July by myself. It's driver was a huge guy in an orange bomber jacket, by the way.