Countdown to 2021!
At last. 2020 is nearly over. It's been a tumultuous year for the entire world, and I think most of us are glad to be turning over a new page, even if the future is still uncertain. As I always do, I'll sign off the year with a review of the different concepts we've looked at this year, and give a preview of what to expect in 2021.
2020 In Review
There were three major themes we covered this year. For much of the start of this year, we focused on AI. The main product of this was our work on a Haskell version of Open AI Gym. We explored ways to generalize the idea of an AI agent, including cool integrations of Haskell ideas like type families. We even wrote this in such a way that we could incorporate Tensor Flow! You can read about that work in our Open AI Series.
Over the summer, we switched gears a bit and focused on Rust. In our Rust Web Series we solved some more interesting problems to parallel our Real World Haskell Series. This included building a simple web server and connecting to a database.
Then our final work area was on our Haskellings program. Modeled after Rustlings, this is intended to be an automated beginner tutorial for the Haskell language. For the first time, I changed up the content a bit and did a video series, rather than a written blog series. So you can find the videos for that series on our YouTube Channel!
We're looking for people to contribute exercises (and possibly other code) to the Haskellings project, so definitely visit the repository if you'd like to help!
Looking Forward
There will be some big changes to the blog in 2021. Here are some of the highlights I'm looking forward to:
Spending more time on how Haskell fits into the broader programming ecosystem and what role it can play for those new to the industry. What can beginning programmers learn from the Haskell language and toolchain? What lessons of Haskell are applicable across many different languages? More exploration of different content types and media. As mentioned above, I spent the last part of 2020 experimenting with video blogs. I expect to do more of this type of experimenting this year. Upgrading the site's appearance and organization. Things have been pretty stagnant for a while, and there are a lot of improvements I'd like to make. For one example, I'd like to make coding sections more clear and interactive in blog posts. New, lighter-weight course material. Right now, our course page has 2 rather large courses. This year I'm going to look at breaking the material in these out into smaller, more manageable chunks, as well as adding a couple totally new course offerings at this smaller size.
I've set a lot of these goals before and fallen short. Unfortunately, I've found that these priorities often get pushed aside due to my desire to publish new content weekly, as I've been doing for over 4 years now (how time flies!). But starting in 2021, I'm going to focus on quality over quantity. I do not plan on publishing every week, and a lot of the blogs I do publish will highlight improvements to old content, rather than being new, detailed technical tutorials. I hope these changes will take the most important content on the blog and make it much more useful to the intended audiences.
I also have a tendency of creating projects to demonstrate concepts, but leave the projects behind once I am done writing about those concepts. This year, I hope to take a couple of my projects, specifically Open AI Gym and the Haskellings Beginner Tutorial and turn them into polished products that other developers will want to use. This will take a lot of focused time and effort, but I think it will be worth it.
So even though you might not see a new post every Monday, never fear! Monday Morning Haskell is here to stay! I hope all of you have a happy and safe new year!