This month I turned 32. This seemed like such a nice round number that I thought I could make a game around it. I have recently developed an interest in making small performance improvements and feature additions to the Julia programming language. So what if I made it a goal, for example, to contribute 32 new features this year? That would correspond to more than two new features a month, which I think is far to ambitious. Something more like ‘log_2(32) = 5’ would be much more attainable. Along similar lines we also have ‘32 + 2016 = 2^11’. The number “eleven” is a nice small one. Maybe I could cook up eleven tests to increase coverage? When you start to think about it 2^11 actually isn’t that many lines of code over the course of a year right?
This kind of numerological reasoning generates so many options that it gives me the confidence that I will make ‘f(32)’ important contribution to JuliaLang in the upcoming year (for some value of ‘f’).