Welcoming 2020 with our reflections on 2019

Ali

I've done a bit of travelling this year: skiing in the Italian Dolomites (beautiful!), returning to old friends in the Swiss Alps (nostalgic!) and attending JSConf EU in Berlin (inspiring, if extremely hot!).

My teaching with Code Your Future continued with our biggest and most successful class ever. Congratulations to all class 5 alumni. We have welcomed our brand new class 6 in November, good luck to all of them in the new year!

At Overleaf, I became a team lead for the first time. Thanks to everyone on Team 💧 for being incredible teammates, can't wait to see what we build next! Behind the scenes I've been upgrading our infrastructure, helping our developers bring improvements to you faster.

Looking forward to 2020 and hoping everyone has happy holidays :)

Lian Tze

November 2019 marks my Five-Year-Anniversary as a Community TeXpert with Overleaf. What a five years these have been, from writeLaTeX to Overleaf to Overleaf+ShareLaTeX to Overleaf v2! I handled half-a-dozen support requests a day, to more than 50 a day at times , over the period of these five years. And no wonder, as we now support 5 million users at Overleaf, including students, teachers, lecturers, researchers, publishers, editors and hobbyists, so we are supporting an increasingly diversified users and needs.

Therefore 2019 also saw the expansion to a full Support Team, and a new Product Team! We're now able to work even more effectively with the Development Team using feedback from our users to launch oft-requested features like project ownership transfer and a new project archival/deletion flow. We've also been handling two TeX Live upgrades in 2019, and to prepare for these upgrades I checked through 600+ Gallery templates that may have needed modifications to be ready for TeX Live 2018 and 2019!

It's exciting times and pacing, so I was thankful to have the chance to spend time in person with the team at the Digital Science company retreat (and a nice dinner in a fancy dress), and with family on our holiday trip to Japan!

Here's to the crazy year that was 2019; and I welcome 2020 with these three calendar templates!

Graham

2019 has been a year of mixed projects, including writing and production of some extensive publications/articles on TeX, such as:

• an online listing of nearly 1000 TeX primitives, cross-referenced to show the primitive commands supported by 9 different TeX engines. This required an analysis of the source code for each TeX engine to extract the list of built-in commands

• an extensive article on understanding LuaTeX’s \directlua command

• a six-part series on how TeX macros actually work

• a six-part series on how the \expandafter command actually works

Other work has included moving/porting 800 LaTeX templates from one platform to another.

An ongoing project is improving/enhancing a custom build of TeX (derived from Knuth’s original) which I use during research for our “deep TeX” articles (including some of those listed above). This specialized build of TeX, compiled using the Eclipse IDE, is used to probe TeX’s inner workings, helping to ensure our background articles are technically correct. Lately, this work has included partitioning TeX’s monolithic (machine-generated) C source code into multiple smaller files. The objective is to ease the process of modifying/exploring TeX—and at the same time trying to document some of TeX’s more complex, machine-generated, C source code.

In 2020 I’m planning to write a series of articles on typesetting tables in TeX (or LaTeX)—exploring the underlying mechanics to help explain, and understand, just why tables can, at times, be rather “tricky” to typeset. Even Knuth himself was moved to remark (in TeX’s source code) that “It's sort of a miracle whenever \halign and \valign work...”—referring to the low-level commands (and algorithms) he designed for typesetting tables.

On a personal note, I spend most Sundays with friends/family taking long walks in the countryside, guided by the excellent Beyond Bristol books by Robin Tetlow. So with 2019 approaching its last few days, I’d like to wish everyone in the wider Overleaf community an enjoyable festive season and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2020.

Ryan

2019 at Overleaf saw the Support team grow - a good thing, since our user base has grown to over five million! Each month, we hear from about 1,500 of those users. I enjoyed my work travels to London, Dublin, San Diego, and Washington, DC. I’m looking forward to another year of continuing to help the support team take great care of our users, both through direct user support, and through collaboration with other teams.

At home in Virginia, I completed the C-Ville-athon for the fifth time, continuing my streaker status in this challenge to run a combined 26.2 miles in area not for profit running races.

I have a new colleague in my home office - Shark the dog!

He’s such a mutt that the dog dna test could only identify half of his breed mix. The other half is 25% miniature poodle, 12.5% shih tzu, and 12.5% English foxhound. Shark and I wish everyone a very happy New Year!

Miguel

2019 has been an exciting year for me. I joined the Overleaf Engineering Team before the summer and I've really enjoyed the last few months. The biggest milestone has been releasing the up-to-date version of Overleaf Server Pro, which our customers were really looking forward to trying out. It's been a few months of navigating through really old code, a dozen different technologies and lots of code reading. Quite a challenge!

On the personal side the highlight was travelling to Japan in October for the Rugby World Cup. It was a wonderful trip, and although my favourite team (allez les bleus!) didn't win, there were plenty of thrilling games. Looking forward to the 2023 edition in France!

Roberta

2019 has definitely been an exciting year for me. I started working for Overleaf in late May, and I can’t recall a happier time in my career! The team is really great, everyone in the team is very enthusiastic and proactive, and our community of users is so engaged. I’ve spent the last couple of months interviewing users and it was a revelation to see how much they care and want to contribute to the product.

We are a fully remote team, so one key highlight for me was to help organise our first remote hackathon! We had virtual rooms for people to go and ‘visit’ each other, some exciting projects running for over 24 hours (because of the different time-zones), and a collaborative playlist to share music among the team. Although I didn’t take part in the projects, I used the hackathon to dab my feet into Python for the first time :).

On a more personal side, I was very happy to be able to go on a three-week-long road trip to California! We started in Death Valley, then up to Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, then down through Highway 1 on the Big Sur, L.A. and then up again towards Palm Springs and the Mojave desert. We saw some incredible landscapes and wildlife, it was really humbling to see sea lions roaming wild on the beach, or hearing the loudest cicadas ever! My favourite part was going on a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas and back. The view was stunning, what a way to end the holiday!

One other big event was moving into our new home. I finally have space for a millinery studio and for a proper home office. Maybe I should get a dog next? :)

I am grateful for all these happy times and opportunities in 2019, and now I look forward to an exciting year ahead, both at home and at work, as we plan more feature releases on Overleaf in 2020.

Natalie

2019 has been a fantastic year for me! We celebrated my daughter’s first birthday and my partner and I both enjoyed taking the whole of August off to have lots of family time together. During our month off we did a couple of camping trips and a few beach trips during the heatwave. Beatrix sort of liked her first dip in the English Channel! One of the trips was to Wilderness festival in Oxfordshire, as the name implies it is set on a beautiful piece of land that is a slice of paradise. There is a lake where you can swim next to some woods and the grounds are absolutely stunning, plus there are lots of great bands and it’s super children friendly. We also enjoyed a camping trip to Devon with my brother where I had a few chances to practice surfing and we had a nice bbq on the beach. Admittedly some of the trip was a bit of a washout but we still had fun. Gotta love British camping :)

At Overleaf the advisor program has continued to grow, we now have over 300 advisors from across the globe. This year we have laid foundations to further support our advisor group and I’m looking forward to developing these in 2020. It has also been incredible to read the many testimonials people share about Overleaf on twitter, it really is fantastic working on a product that is so loved!

Antony

2019 has been one of the busiest years for me to date. Since starting with Overleaf in April I have been working to build a pipeline and making my first sales into new institutions and territories (new for me anyway). To represent Overleaf at conferences in both the UK and overseas has also been a real pleasure. Hearing how positive and enthusiastic users and institutions from across the globe are about Overleaf is fantastic.

Alongside starting my new role with Overleaf things have been even more hectic. A one year old starting in nursery for the first time, learning to walk, talk and generally create mischief 24/7 has kept us busy. It was with great timing that he made his first steps while we took our summer holiday and we both spent 2 weeks chasing him around.

A final project for me in 2019 was project managing an extension to our home. A small building project that should have taken 10 weeks but actually lasted just shy of 10 months (through no fault of the project manager I might add). At least it’s finished in time for Christmas and I have a new stove to heat the house / mess about with and burn stuff.

Mary Anne

This year has flown by! I can’t believe I’m already writing my ‘end of year’ summary for 2019! It’s been a crazy, hectic year filled with ups and downs. Through it all, Overleaf has been a source of joy for me - surpassing 5 millions users and providing direct end-user support for over 5 years are incredible milestones. I can’t believe how much Overleaf has grown since I started at the beginning of 2015! And I’m so lucky to have the privilege to work with this incredible group of people we have at Overleaf. It’s been a year of hard work - but a lot of fun!

On a personal note - my twin boys started college this year - so that’s been exciting! On top of their hectic college schedule, they still successfully run the business they started which connects young adults to help seniors with technology. I’m so proud of them for not only starting a business that continues to grow - but for it to be a business that helps so many people in our community. :-) My husband and I love watching the boys grow into wonderful young men!

And to end, I want to say thank you to all our customers and the wonderful end users I’ve had the pleasure of working with this year! I truly wish you all a magical holiday season and the happiest of New Years!

Pedro

What a year! I joined the company in May, and it has been a great ride ever since. It's fantastic to be part of such an amazingly diverse team and contributing to a product everyone loves to love. (An anecdote: when I ask my old research colleagues if they use Overleaf, the most common answer is "Who doesn't?")

At the personal level, the kids continue to grow. There's always something fun (or crazy?) happening with a 3 and a 5-year-old around. I also helped my wife launch her startup, which has been a gratifying experience.

I want to finish with a huge thanks to everyone within and outside the company. Let's have a great 2020 together!

Tom

The year 2019 was full of changes in my life. First, I decided not to continue in my academic career after my current PostDoc in mathematics. At the same time I decided to pursue studies to become a professional church musician, which means a lot of playing the organ and other stuff. To accommodate all of this, I was looking for a flexible job, and that brought me here to Overleaf during the autumn!

Having spent only 3 months at Overleaf, I cannot say I achieved much here, but I settled in and I look forward to the challenges of 2020. It goes slightly better with my organ practice, and this is me playing some nice baroque music on my home organ: