2016 is quickly coming to a close. I noticed I haven’t posted anything in quite some time, so this is my attempt to jot down a quick list of my favorite things from 2016, with no particular ordering or planning. A lot of things, both good and bad, happened in 2016 but here’s my list of things I really liked.

DOOM (2016)

Wow, I can honestly say I was blown away by this. I thought id Software had an impossible task in resurrecting the Doom franchise, but they succeeded magnificently. I know they tried to push the multiplayer features more than the single-player campaign, which almost put me off of it entirely. But overall it was very fun to play and definitely the surprise winner for “best thing I played this year,” if there were such a thing.

Hamilton: An American Musical

Admittedly I didn’t find out about Hamilton until spring 2016, when the show had already been playing on Broadway since the previous fall. I’m also not a very big fan of hip-hop. However, I have had a difficult time not listening to the cast album whenever I’m in the car, so I think that means it’s very good. I most likely will wait for the show to tour through my neighborhood, but I don’t fault people who spend the money for a trip to New York or Chicago to see the show live. It’s a lesser-known piece of American history told in a unique style and I find it supremely entertaining. This show motivated me to buy season tickets to support live theater, which is something I never would have considered doing otherwise.

Rust

I don’t blog here much about programming anymore, since I haven’t had time to work on my personal project website for years now, but Rust is pretty awesome. It’s a modern programming language that borrows steals a lot of good ideas from functional languages but makes it accessible to average programmers like myself, who struggle a lot with the abstract functional concepts in languages like Haskell. I only used Rust to do a measly few days of Advent of Code 2016 puzzles, but I like what I’ve seen and I’m going to try to complete the rest before next December.

Haskell Programming from first principles

Still on the thread of functional programming, this is the best book about it I think I’ve found in a long while. I’ve only completed the first few chapters, but this is something I look forward to jumping more into in 2017. It assumes no prior programming knowledge whatsoever, which is convenient for me. When I started my road to learning Haskell I felt nothing I knew from past programming experience helped much at all. “Oh, I need to use recursion instead of for loops?” and “I can’t change any variable after I’ve assigned it?” was a lot to take on, but this book has done a great job so far of dragging me out of my limit mindset. It’s a bit on the expensive side but I think it’s going to pay off.

That’s it for now, but I may come back and add more if I think of it. I’m about to head off to a New Year’s Eve party and wanted to unload this before 2017 landed. Happy New Year!