At Year's End: 2018

I haven’t posted a ton this year. It turns out, however, that this has been a symptom of having a very eventful year more-so than of disinterest.

Some of you may have seen that earlier this year my startup, Predikto, was acquired by United Technologies.  You can read a little bit about why UTC bought us here:

http://www.utc.com/News/News-Center/Pages/United-Technologies-Acquires-Predikto-Inc.aspx

and here:

https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/08/20/united-technologies-buys-analytics-firm-predikto-to-boost-predictive-maintenance/

The process of building and running a company is difficult and stressful, but the process of selling one is worse. While incredibly exciting, cathartic, and encouraging, many of my side projects fell by the wayside.  PedalWrencher has been shut down, and Category Encoders has found a fantastic co-maintainer JanMotl, who has done great work to keep the project chugging along.

Category encoders is also going through a bit of a maturation. There is a strong community of consistent contributors, and overall quality of the library is trending up nicely. We are working on some process improvements with things like release cycles and planning. There has never been a better time to get involved in the project so if you are interested in the kind of work I post about here, head over to GitHub and join in on the issues page.

In addition to these two larger points, a lot of smaller things happened this year. I wrote a dockerfile for ElasticSearch-HQ, which has been pulled almost 300k times this year (wow). I think this legally makes me a devops expert now?  I went to Colombia twice, and learned first hand how wonderful of a country it is. I did a couple of podcasts (here and here).

Next year ought to be more of the same, I’m excited about the opportunity to do things the right way at UTC and have some fun along the way.

Happy Holidays, -Will

Like this:

Like Loading…

Related