I don’t really get the whole new year thing. Everybody is talking about change and good wishes and what not, but I don’t see how anything will change just because of a simple date increment. I guess humanity needs this artificial mile stones to reflect on what has been done and what has happened. Having said that, today probably is a day, as good as any, to look back and think a little. Since I like bullet points I’ll use those to list what I’ve done in 2009 (in no particular order):
- I finally took some time to actually learn something about JavaScript and I feel in love with it, jQuery has probably helped here a lot and I can’t imagine how the internet worked without this beautiful language in the past.
- I improved my knowledge of PHP, written a brand new framework with which I’m happy with (for now), it even got some praise from someone I worked with for a short while.
- Like with JavaScript above, I took the time to improve my HTML&CSS skills and that worked out quite well. These three things are so easy that nobody actually learns them but just pick up on them as he goes along. Luckily I realized this is a mistake and I am still working on improving my skills in this area.
- I started reading technical blogs and web pages again. I learned a lot from other (smarter) people this way.
- I used memcache on a couple of our projects, great technology.
- I learned Comet and developed chat with it, hackish stuff Comet, but the future is looking bright on the real-time-web front.
- I’ve started to actively participate on StackOverflow (see my badge on the left) again. It’s a great way to brush up on your skills and give something back to the community.
- I’ve started to write here on this page again which is a great way to, hopefully, give back something to the community.
- I went to my first conference ( PHP Konferenca)
- I had my first lecture at WebCampLjubljana, and that was a great experience and I hope I’ll have a chance to do it again sometime.
- I was given a task to find another programmer for our company and although that didn’t quite work out in the end, I gained a lot of experience from that process.
- We launched a brand new web page ( spored.tv), redid another one from scratch ( mojalbum.com) and cloned a couple of others ( igre123.rs, mojnet.rs). It’s always great to work on something completely new and, like I said, I had the pleasure to develop two brand new web pages in one year.
- I’ve lost a customer for reasons I don’t quite understand which has hurt me financially but all is well.
- I’ve developed a system that uses the Aliiike recommendation engine
- I’ve written so many lines of code that I’ve forgotten half the stuff I did this year :)
There is probably some more stuff that I can’t remember right now, I’ll edit if I remember something else. And here is what I’d like to do/improve in the next year:
- I’d like to play with the technologies that are behind the NoSQL movement.
- I will introduce a versioning software to our company (yes I know, shame on me).
- I will set-up a wiki where I will try to document as much as possible.
- I will try to get some more break from my work as to avoid burning out.
- I will improve my PHP/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/whatever else I’m using skills.
- I would like to learn a new programming language.
- I will work on my people skills and try to bring my arrogance down for just a notch :)
Again there is probably something I’ve forgotten to put on that list.
All in all as far as my professional life/career goes this was a successful year. I won’t talk about my personal life here, but I will say that it kinda sucked. That is all.
