* Unscented Kalman Filters - These are really cool, wow. I'm pretty sure the unscented transform has a lot more potential than just being used with Kalman filters too, someone should investigate that. Also this year I learned that the truncated Kalman Filters I've been developing for the past few years are a lot more useful and powerful than I realized, and I'm interested in exploring more general ways to use those. (Unfortunately Google won't let me publish these though.)
* Vertx server - Web server frameworks generally manage to make me mad, and this is the first one I was actually happy enough that I'll keep using it. Has a few rough edges though - I wrote a multiple database query method by hand, and Vertx's JsonObject type makes it really easy to accidentally create an infinite loop.
* Elastic beanstalk - Is actually kind of terrible? And yet it's so much closer to what I actually want (run my jar on X machines, reboot as needed, never think about it again) than what I've used before (actual servers, ec2, app engine) that I'm also sticking with this.
* Postgres - I mean I've technically used postgres before but I wrote a reddit clone from scratch this year so I know a lot more now. Hey it's as good as everyone says, go figure. Also pgadmin is so bad, wow.
* Peg.js - Parsers have always been intimidating to me and playing with this really cut down the intimidation factor. I'll write my own parsers for anything important, but still use this for prototyping grammars. The idea that you can have a dirty prototype of a grammar is mind-blowing to me though.
