Looking back on 2012, ahead to 2013

I’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.