2011 was the year that was pretty much defined by the earthquakes in Christchurch. Everything else seems insignificant, but it turns out I did other things too.
- Christchurch was devastated by the earthquakes of 22 February. Unlike the big one last year, this one was almost directly under the city and destroyed lives, property, and livelihoods. Again we were lucky and did not sustain any major damage.
- My parents visited in September. I took a couple of weeks off work and we did a big tour of the South Island and they had a great time.
- Received a Microsoft MVP for C++ award for a second time. This is based on my continuing participation answering programming questions on Stack Overflow.
- Amy and I officially became New Zealand citizens on 7 November.
- Passed my NCEA Level 1 Chinese assessment. This involved a one minute spoken presentation where I talked about our trip with my parents.
- In December, moved to Auckland. Amy will be attending school at AUT for a three-year programme for sign language interpreting for the Deaf. I'll be working remotely from home, which is new for me. We plan to return to Christchurch after Amy is done.
And, in the software section:
- Published the Stack Overflow ebooks, which is a library of the top rated questions and answers on Stack Overflow for the most popular tags.
- Contributed a number of improvements to Cppcheck, a static analyser for C and C++.
- Started on a Javascript implementation of a Java VM. Others have done this too, I just wanted to try.
- Added the NOAA Weather Radio tools to Github (I had written that code years ago, but had never released the source).
- picomath is a collection of standalone mathematical functions in many different programming languages.