To paraphrase Bill Gates, most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. I definitely underestimated my 2015 and found it rewarding to go back and realize just how much happened. I published a book. I moved to Italy. I started a company. I did a lot of traveling. And a whole lot more:

Happy new year!


First up, for the followers of my blog, here are my most popular blog posts from 2015:


New Projects

Next, here are the new projects I launched in 2015:

Atomic Squirrel

https://www.atomic-squirrel.net

In 2015, I founded Atomic Squirrel, a company that specialized in helping new startups get off the ground. In 2016, Atomic Squirrel merged with another company called Phoenix DevOps to become Gruntwork.

Hello, Startup

https://www.hello-startup.net/

This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. I based it off of my own experiences, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. If you're at all interested in startups, this book is for you.

Ping-Play: BigPipe Streaming for the Play Framework

https://github.com/brikis98/ping-play

An open source project that brings BigPipe streaming to the Play Framework. It includes tools for a) splitting your pages up into small "pagelets", which makes it easier to maintain large websites, and b) streaming those pagelets down to the browser as soon as they are ready, which can significantly reduce page load time.

Yevgeniy Brikman Homepage

https://github.com/brikis98/yevgeniy-brikman-homepage

I built all the pages you're looking at now using Jekyll, GitHub Pages, and Basscss.


Travel and Other Activities

And finally, here are some of my trips and adventures from 2015: