Entry 121, year five complete, streak intact. This one’s dated the 20th because the 25th belongs to family and the 30th to Zelda; seniority is knowing your own load limits.
The closing fortnight compressed the whole year: net neutrality was repealed on the 14th as scheduled (the slow-boil forecast now on the clock); Bitcoin kissed ~$19,783 on the 17th and is already wobbling (if that was the top, let the record show the top smelled like my barber’s price targets); and The Last Jedi opened to a fascinating split, critics elated, a vocal fan-segment furious, which mostly taught me that beloved legacy systems can’t be refactored without someone filing a grievance about the original architecture. (I liked it. The Luke arc is the brave design choice.)
2017’s thesis: this was the year the bills came due. Equifax and Yahoo paid the security debt. Uber paid the culture debt, publicly, all year. Flash got its scheduled death. The ICO/crypto mania ran up new debt at a pace that made 1999 veterans whistle. And AlphaGo Zero quietly wrote off the largest debt of all: the assumption that human expertise is the ceiling.
One more artifact for the time capsule, filed without fanfare: an arXiv paper from June called “Attention Is All You Need” keeps surfacing in the ML-nerd channels, a new architecture (“Transformer”) that ditches recurrence entirely and trains embarrassingly parallel. My NLP friend calls it “probably a big deal.” Logging it at year-end precisely because it doesn’t feel like news. The out-of-distribution events are the only ones that matter, and they never arrive labeled.
My year: Kubernetes shipped (the congregation now runs the parish), mentored two juniors to mid, hand-squeeze test entered company vocabulary, Proverbs file: 140. Fantasy: eliminated in semis by the intern. The banner still hangs. Next sprint (2018): GDPR lands in May and I’ve volunteered to lead our compliance eng. Pity me, then watch it become the best forcing function we’ve ever had. See you in year six.