Looking back on 2012, ahead to 2013 post
CommentsI'm usually not a fan of these posts, but I felt that doing some reflection would be therapeutic for me. Fair Warning: this post is probably going to be very self-indulgent.
In 2012:
- My wife and I had our second baby boy
- My wife and I got married (we did it backwards)
- Finally talking to my grandparents again after a long strained relationship. Forgiveness is a wonderful thing.
- I presented a talk about PHPUnit at my local PHP user group
- I attended 8 SoFlo PHP Users Group meetups
- Adam Culp, Pablo Godel, John Gills and I drank beers with Derick Rethans from 10gen (MongoDB) after his presentation and argued about the difference between a British Pint and an American Pint
- Watched Rasmus Lerdorf speak and even got to ask him a few questions (about short array syntax in php 5.4). Technically this was December 2011 but I'm still counting it!
- I attended CodeWorks 2012, my first conference - albeit a small one - still great times and very eye opening. I even convinced the boss to shell out for it!
- I helped select talks for SunshinePHP. I also built a little app to help rate the talks with CakePHP at Adam Culp‘s request. It was and is a great honor to be help out with this upcoming conference. Click here to buy tickets
- I moved into the lead developer position at work (on my team) and have really had some great experiences there this year.
- Made my first wordpress plugin
- Started playing Magic: The Gathering again, via Magic Online and on the iPad and PC via Duels of the Planeswalkers. I used to play this almost 17 years ago when I was around 12-13 years old.
Some regrets and sadness in 2012:
- I regret not giving more talks, although life definitely got in the way
- I wanted to see Robert Martin talk since he was in the area, but missed it
- My co-worker Conrad shipped off to Atlanta! There are special people in life that teach you things from another perspective and Conrad is definitely one of them.
- Election Season wasn't nearly as exciting as I had hoped (the primaries sucked out all the energy).
Now for this year's docket. In 2013:
- I will attend SunshinePHP, my first large conference right here in South Florida!
- I really want to go to PHPTek13 in Chicago, which will hopefully be a watershed moment
- Take the Zend Certification Exam for PHP 5.3
- I am giving a presentation about Nginx and Memcache at my local PHP user group
- Spend more time playing Minecraft with my soon to be 4 year-old son. Seriously this is the best.
- Play less games. My Steam collection is about 142 games and growing and I'm not even counting other sources of games. I must have put hundreds of hours into games this year.
- Write more blog posts. In 2012, I only wrote something like 5 blog posts compared to around 22 for 2011.
- Finish more software! (https://github.com/jblotus) Seriously I start something like 1 project per week, and usually throw code in it for a day and abandon it. Truthfully I usually do this to play with new libraries and such but it would be nice to actually release something.
So that's all I can think about right now. Here's to the new year! Thanks for reading.