QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

I realize its already half way through the month, but I needed to get the obligatory year in review out. I had to bother. Why? Because last year was BIG. I ended 2008 leaving my former job to pursue greater things. My big goal for the year was to do awesome work, start building a reputation, and give back to the community. I’m very proud to say I accomplished all of those. I did so by working my ass off. Straight hustling.

Highlights:

• Getting married!
• Speaking at 4 technical conferences including ones in Japan and Scotland.
• Starting a fund that raised ~$1000 for RailsBridge and the Anita Borg Foundation.
• Releasing Sammy.js and seeing a number of large organizations and companies use it in production.
• Contributing to, releasing, and maintaining over 40 open source projects.
• Working with a number of really awesome companies with very talented individuals including Paperless Post and Wejetset
• Traveling a lot: Japan, Scotland, 3 trips to the West Coast, Boston, Philly, Virginia.

I can’t really complain. I’ve set some new big goals for this year. The biggest is bit of a step backwards. Last year, I worked a lot. A little too much if you ask my wife and some of my friends. So this year is the year of accomplishing a lot while working less. As much as I love coding, there are other things I love more. Namely, my wife. In an attempt to break it down into actual achievable goals:

• Only work with clients that I want to work with. A side luxury of working my ass off is that I’ve been offered a bit more work then I can feasibly do myself. Which puts me almost exactly where I want to be – being able to work on projects I genuinely find fun and interesting. Lucky me!
• Take it down a notch with the open source shenanigans. This is slightly unfortunate, but I’m almost as overwhelmed with open source projects as I am with client work. I’m not going to dump or stop supporting the popular highly used projects, like Sammy or qadmin, but some of the lesser known used ones are going to become unsupported and I’m going to try to slow down with creating new ones. Try.
• Cook more, write more, read more, learn more, see more people. My new meetup/idea code should address some of these. Very excited for the first meeting next week. Buying a kindle has actually made me read way more. I’m trying to spend more time on actual dedicated learning.

At the end of 2010 I want to look back and think about how much fun I had and how much I learned. So, friends and colleagues, heres to those goals and a great new year.

Posted January 12th, 2010 in Development, Life
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