One Year of Comics

The first comic

It's hard to believe, but I've been publishing Amphibian.com comics three times per week for a whole year now. A whole year! That's like 156 comics! And I'm not finished!

I thought I'd take a few minutes to reflect on the things that have happened in the past year.

I also wrote 156 blog posts. One for each comic. Sometimes technical (related to something with Node or JavaScript in general, mostly) and sometimes they were not. My blog traffic went from around 20-30 views per week to around 800-900.

First daughter added this year

#ggo15

I made over 200 commits to open source projects on GitHub. Most were to my own repositories, but I am committed to keeping the source code to my comic framework open. I want to share all the code!

Some of those commits were to a fork of a game while I was competing in the GitHub Game Off 2015. And I won! I got lots of stickers, a GitHub hoodie, and my kids all got Octocat shirts.

I adopted a wonderful teenager from the foster care system. I encourage everyone to consider doing the same.

Second daughter added this year

While making a joke about paywalls, I created the best Bitcoin micropayment integration the world has ever seen. In the process, I created a legitimate use of the (yet unofficial) 402 HTTP response code. I didn't realize that at the time. I thought I was just doing a fun comic and I might make a few dollars. But Reddit went crazy for it and I got a lot of attention - and Bitcoins.

I have some now

A few weeks after that, my wife gave birth to our fourth child. I named her Kayci and I now have daughters aged 16, 10, 6, and 0.15 years.

What will happen over the next 12 months? I'm not sure. I don't really have anything planned (besides making more comics), so I'll just see where life takes me.

Take note that today's comic takes place in the same scene as the first comic did. I think that's where the frogs have all their important meetings.

Amphibian.com comic for 3 August 2015