Mile
Zero

Last Tuesday was my last day at Seattle Central College, and I turned in my grades over the weekend. If nothing else, this leaves me with 10-20 free hours a week. And while I'll no doubt spend much of that time watching movies, practicing my dance moves, or catching up on my Steam backlog, I do have some projects that I want to finally start (or restart) in my spare time.

• Rebuild Grue: back when I was leaving Big Fish Games, I spent a couple of weeks working on a text adventure framework called Grue. The main goal of it was to make constructing interactive fiction in JavaScript as easy as possible. I think it was reasonably successful: a sample world is surprisingly readable and intuitive. It also got a bunch of things wrong (weird inheritance system, poor module setup). I'm planning on rebooting Grue in 2016, using ES2015 and a Node-compatible interface.
• Upgrade Caret's find/replace functionality: A few months ago, in one of my rare open source success stories, a contributor added project-wide search to Caret — a much-requested feature for years now. Unfortunately, we're still stuck with the default Ace dialog for find/replace within a single file. This year, I want to pull that out and re-implement it as a Caret UI widget, which (among other things) will fix a number of regular-expression bugs.
• Play music: Bass took a backseat to breaking when I started dancing a few years ago. These days, my fingers are noticeably slower on the strings than the used to be, which seems like a shame since I bought a really nice bass before we moved to Seattle. If I can find a laid-back open mike, I might resuscitate Four String Riot for a session or two.
• Break the web: In a recent project at the paper, I started using the getUserMedia API to access the built-in camera from a web app. It turns out this is, apart from some weirdness and the need to polyfill, pretty great: you don't need native code to access the camera (of course it's not in Safari). Now I want to do some additional mini-apps that use other future-forward web APIs, like Service Worker and gamepads.
• Write another book/article series: I've gotten a lot of really good feedback on JavaScript for the Web Savvy, both from inside my classes and by random readers around the Internet. Now that I have some time, I'd like to write another book, probably this time packaging up some of the lessons I've learned working in data journalism. I also want to pitch an article series that helps get people from the basics of web production up to more serious news app development.
• Hacks/Hackers meetup: Finally, last year I took over the local Hacks/Hackers meetup group, but I've been too busy to organize anything for it. Now that I have the time to round people up and gather resources, I want to make good on my goal of holding a day-long event one weekend — either as a hack day or a training session of some kind. More details as I figure it out!