2016 debrief

Lazy year, mostly ended up burning through savings -_-

Releases

• Drawmore Touch - small painting toy using Three.js, for my Samsung Note 5. Also works on IE and iPad Pencils (tho the iPads are not very performant on this).
• Tabletree.io prototype - applied to YCombinator with this. No luck. (And no business model. Or co-founder. Or marketing plan. Or sales plan. Or anything really.)
• Raytraced VR toy made in Unity - looks kinda neat. Pick stuff up by holding down trigger. Try picking up the big ball with one hand and putting another object inside it, then release the other object to launch it.
• fhtr.net timeline editor toy - Turned the company portfolio site into a timeline toy instead. Because money is overrated.
• 3D track thing for XingZhe - ride your bicycle and see it played back in glorious 3D.
• Living painting - speech-triggered animations projected on a painting
• Sales catalog app done using NW.js.
• Tablet kiosk app + node.js server to control an Arduino-driven installation.
• Video menu WordPress plugin - ping the friends at raade.at if you'd like to buy one
• Hong Kong Typhoons - datavis of the typhoon alerts given in Hong Kong over the years. Idea and design by the amazing Dennys Hess, I did the intro, coding and UX mistakes :) The backend is a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Which makes me either a genius or an idiot. Betting on the latter.
• ShaderPaint - Hey, why not! (Um. It's actually a nice programming model for this.)
• Intro animation for some company's Rio Olympics promo site in GSAP + SVG (then SVG was too slow and vaguely incompatible across browsers, so I redid it in Pixi. In hindsight, should've started with Pixi. But the SVG workflow is nicer: save SVG with id-tagged objects from Illustrator, animate SVG objects with GSAP, don't worry about screen resolutions.
• Lots of paintings of clouds and hills and some other things. Bunch of Cinema4D noob renders.

Places visited

• Hong Kong, great in the winter. Though you're going to need a heater when the cold weeks hit. Way too hot and humid in the summer. Occasional typhoons (locals call them unscheduled public holidays.) Teslas everywhere.
• Bali, hot, lots of sunshine, full of tourists, nice if you find a place that's nice or like riding scooters (which there are a lot.)
• San Francisco, Los Angeles, Yosemite, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Oakland, definite highlight was hanging out with Cabbibo and seeing the VR stuff he was building. And going climbing with Ken and friends. And randomly meeting with a bunch of Finnish VR devs and BlurSpline in SF, who were in town for F8. And going to Yosemite. And running up and down Venice Beach in LA. Oh who am I kidding, the whole trip was awesome.
• London in the summer, lovely as usual (watch out for smog)
• Blasting through the English countryside in a convertible with a bunch of landscape painters, waiting for Brexit to separate us like a dandelion seeds in the wind. Dartmoor, great in the summer. Copy of the Monet waterlily garden somewhere in England.
• Finland, Helsinki and Lappeenranta - picking berries and mushrooms, rowing on the lake, hiking in the woods, good times
• Tallinn - beautiful old town, good food, amazing seljanka
• San Francisco again, Newark, Palo Alto. Interviewed with Facebook for a Front-End Engineer position in London. No luck (then again, I bombed the interview kinda badly.)
• London again in the winter - love the amount of walking I end up doing there. Cool weather and half hour walk to the Oveground station.
• Canary Isles - Gran Canaria and Tenerife - Sand dunes! Sloths! Volcanoes! Chilly weather!
• Netherlands, Altmarkt and Hardwijk - Beautiful towns, so livable. Great bread, good food, freezing fog with zero visibility on highways, beautiful rolling hills (not very high, mind!) 
• Finland again - ICE ICE ICE, absolutely gorgeous sunny winter days, dusting of snow, and then it got -25C with strong wind, which was awesome on the ice (hint: wrap yourself up like a mummy and maybe your face won't get frozen.)
• Hunan a bunch of times.
• Shanghai, Hangzhou, rode bicycle third of the way around Qiandao Lake.
• Dubai airport, Abu Dhabi airport. Emirates had nice seats, Etihad's mood music is so good. Dubai airport was nicer, but I also got there when everything was not closed. Six pounds for a Starbucks coffee? Um. How about buying a $140 lottery ticket that may win you a Porsche? No? Odd place.