2017 retrospective

Another year pulls on its winter boots and prepares to hurry through the frigid night to wherever old years go to die. From a purely Agile point of view, putting aside all the odious nonsense going on in the world for a moment, it was a good year here at Agile, and I hope it was for you too. If not — if you were unduly affected by any of the manifold calamities in 2017 — then we wish you the best and hope life bounces back with renewed vigour in 2018.

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A reproducible festive card for you, made from a well-
log and a bunch of random numbers. Make your own. 

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It's that time when I like to self-indulgently glance back over the last twelve months — both on the blog and elsewhere in the Agile universe. Let's start with the blog...

The most popular posts

We should top 52 posts this year (there's just something about the number 52). Some of them do little more than transmit news, events and such, but we try to bring you entertainment and education too. Just no sport or weather. These were our most visited posts in this year:

• Machine learning meets seismic interpretation — Evan's highlights from an analytics session at EAGE in Paris.
• Machine learning and analytics in geoscience — what happened at the analytics workshop at EAGE in Paris.
• Attribution is not permission — all about that time when Elsevier published a horrible book about reservoir analysis.
• No more rainbows! — last week's post about rainbow colourmaps broke all our traffic records.
• The new reality — how the future is not going to be like the past. Not in petroleum geoscience anyway.

As usual though, the most popular page on the site is k is for wavenumber, the 2012 post that keeps on giving. The other perennials are Well tie workflow, What is anisotropy? and What is SEG Y? 

Engagement

We love getting comments! Most people tend to chime in via Twitter or LinkedIn, but we get quite a few on the blog. Indeed, the posts listed above got more than 60 comments between them. The following were the next most commented upon:

• Organizing spreadsheets — how to make a spreadsheet more useful by making it more like a database.
• Isn't everything on the internet free? — a follow-up post to Attribution is not permission (see above).
• More precise SEG-Y and SEG-Y Rev 2 again — a pair of posts looking at the new SEG-Y standard.

Where is everybody?

1. Houston (about 6.6% of you)
2. Calgary (4.8%)
3. London (3.3%)
4. Perth (1.8%)
5. Moscow (1.3%)
6. Stavanger (1.2%)
7. Rio de Janiero (1.1%)
8. Kuala Lumpur (1.0%)
9. Paris (1.0%)
10. Aberdeen (0.9%)

Work

We're fortunate to have had a good year at Agile. I won't beat our drum too hard, but here's a bit of what we've been up to:

• We're doing a machine learning project on GPR interpretation.
• We finished a machine learning lithology prediction project for Canstrat.
• Matt did more seep and DHI mapping on Canada's Atlantic margin.
• It was a good year for hackathons, with over 100 people taking part in 2017.
• Agile Libre brought out a new book, 52 More Things... Palaeontology.
• We hired awesome data scientist Diego Castañeda (right) full time. 

Thank you

Last but far from least — thank you. We appreciate your attention, one of the most precious resources you have. We love writing useful-and/or-interesting stuff, and are lucky to have friends and colleagues who read it and push us to do more, and a bit better than before. It would be a chore if it wasn't for your readership.

All the best for this Yuletide season, and for a peaceful New Year. Cheers!