2013 Research Priorities

I get asked a lot: “Hey Beren – what’s hot and cool in 2013?” I kind of mumble about this and that and as a true terchno-geek I suppose I change my mind quite a bit. I guess I should use my blog to put it down and then I can see next year if I was full of crap, lazy, or just stupid. So here goes….the list of things I want to dig into this year:

• BaaS: backend as a service. There’s a bunch of companies that provide this like kiney.com, apigee.com, and yes salesforce.com. If you have not checked into this – try it out at kinvey.com. Some pretty dang cool stuff.
• Node.js: I started playing around with this last year, but there’s some pretty serious power behind this web platform and capabilities that are unique. I’m not sure yet how I could use it, but I hope to think of something interesting.
• REST/JSON: APIs are cool…why build if you can leverage? RestKit is great on iOS, but there’s the world on android and windows 8. I plan to really get into API work.
• Salesforce.com: Er…well…maybe the underlying tools force.com, database.com, and heroku.com. They look pretty interesting and could provide a pretty decent set of capabilities. We’ll see
• Hardware? Um yeah – I’ll probably get a new phone, but not sure what. I may get..um er..bold and get a BB 10 device just for kicks. Not sure. the xi3 device looks cool – and I might look into a Windows 8 device.

That’s about it – of course I’ll also continue to look at a lot of programming and software development tools.

Thanks for reading – I forgot to post any details on stats for blogs and posts last year. I’ll try to do that. I had about 200,000 unique visitors, 53% are repeated visitors. Most people spend about 3 minutes reading stuff. Most people look at 2 pages or less per visit. I get a surprising amount of traffic on old pages on Saab cars, crappy Laz-Y-boy furniture, but also get strong traffic on drupal stuff. Almost no traffic on node.js, ios, and other “cutting edge” stuff – I find that pretty darn interesting. I did struggle all year with google and their crappy piece of junk search engine. Even today if you search for my stuff you’ll keep picking up the old site on wordpress even thought its been down for a good 8 months.

Definitely looking forward to the year and working on cool stuff. Thanks for reading!

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
― J.R.R. Tolkien