Being a professional developer really takes some of the wind out of your non-professional sails.  Last year, I had exactly two new repositories added to Github: git-wc and mp-suggest.  The first was a simple wordcount handler for git that would calculate the difference between your current repository and your work in progress, and tell you how much you'd written that day.  I wrote is as a tool for NaNoWriMo.  The second is a fairly straightforward tool for taking apart a directory full of MP3 files and, depending upon the command line flags provided, prints out a bash script for making the contents of the directory consistent: same genre, same album, (possibly) same artist, and some heavy lifting to clean-up the titles, or to derive the titles from the filenames.  It's not rocket science, but it was fun, it's a tool I use regularly, and it's written in Hy, a lisp written for the Python VM.

What did I do in 2014?  Well, mostly I worked for my employer, Splunk, on a pair of projects: first a window manager for data panels associated with the Splunk server; and more recently with the latest revision of the Splunk for Microsoft Exchange application.  I mastered the fine art of managing Splunk configuration files via its REST API, which is absolutely no fun (and the ACL API is a nightmare).

I also read a megafrackton of articles about two distinctly different technologies: Lisp and Haskell.  Lisp's homoiconicity appeals to me much more than Haskell's mathematical underpinnings, and I'm assured that there are uniformities between them.  The problem with these technologies is that my employer isn't really interested in either; since I work with the applications group, what I write has to be comprehensible to third-party developers, they have to be showcases of what's possible using Splunk with a Python back-end and a Javascript front.  So although I love Hy and ClojureScript, it's unlikely that I'll be working in them professionally anytime soon.  Sad, but true.

I'm still not sure what a Monad is.