Year's End: Looking back on 2017

Note: This post has been migrated from my previous blog. Some links and references may point to posts that haven’t been migrated to this new site.

As 2017 draws to a close, I’m looking back on a year of posts and on what all I did in open source. This past year had decidedly fewer posts than 2016, where I was posting a few times a month pretty consistently, but there were still some nice posts that I’ve enjoyed looking back over.

The year started off right with a non-software post, about building a garden shed. I’ve always enjoyed woodworking and have done a lot of it this year, most recently making a dresser that I’m pretty proud of. Pending some pictures that I feel good about, I’ll probably put together some woodworking posts here in 2018.

I haven’t done much development in git-pandas, but I do continue to use it regularly via gitnoc in my professional life. This year it got a very useful addition of a caching layer powered by Redis to speed up common operations significantly.

I’ve taken an interest in the waterways around me, notably the Flint river and Chattahoochee river. Through that interest, I found a tiny little park walking distance from my house that goes down to the shores of the Chattahoochee, who knew.

Category encoders has been going strong all year, it’s used by a whole bunch of people in production, and is now well sustained by external contributors. We may get in one more release this year, but here are some notes on the developers who powered the last one.

We get to contribute to open source some through our work at Predikto, but haven’t published much of our own. Ripyr was a good opportunity to contribute something to the community, and in 2018 I hope to develop it a bit more actively.

Finally my favorite new project of the year is elote, a python package for rating systems like Elo or Glicko. I’ve got some cool things brewing that use it, so be sure to keep an eye on this site in 2018 for those.

So to all readers, hope your 2017 was great, and I look forward to building some good software, furniture, and businesses with you in 2018.

- Will

Update from 2025: It’s fascinating to look back at this post years later. The category_encoders project mentioned here continued to grow beyond my wildest expectations, eventually reaching millions of monthly downloads. And that “favorite new project” elote? It’s one of the libraries I discuss in my post about using AI tools for open source maintenance. My interest in local waterways also led to exploring Standing Peachtree Park, which has a fascinating connection to Atlanta’s history.