Rollercoaster
Many of my friends write blogs that describe their daily lives and, to be honest, I am quite jealous. Every time I sit down to write a post it ends up turning towards geekery and then I am all the sudden 500 words in a discussion or rant that most of my friends don't understand. Part of this is due to the past year, which in review I still have a hard time realizing all that happened I was able to do. In hindsight, I view 2008 as the year that I completely let loose and did everything that I possibly could. I accomplished a lot, tried to do a lot of good (maybe succeeded, maybe failed), and wanted to pass on a couple things that you, my friends, might have missed or not known about. Here is my year in review, as best I can recollect it at least (Adam I leave to you to assign Happy Points).
- I was a security engineer for a consulting company into TSA.
- I went to the SEED conference in Chicago, in February, and was inspired to take the great plunge by Evan Williams.
- I built the foundation for a Agile Data Suite product that provides rapid data implementation and transformation for enterprise data warehouses for a company named Datric.
- I released an enhancement library to the drag and drop functions of Script.aculo.us called dragdropextra.
- I built a System Test and Evaluation reporting script.
- I built a System Test and Evaluation reporting web application.
- I quit working for the consulting agency to go out on my own at Iterative Designs.
- I slept in late the first day of working for myself.
- I provided Subject Matter Expertise for the commercialization of Intellectual Property.
- I went to RailsConf 2008.
- I complained about RailsConf 2008.
- I got invited to RubyFringe due to my complaints.
- Went to RubyFringe, it changed my life & restored my faith in programming.
- Tried to learn Erlang.
- Started NoVA Languages to build a community to help me learn Erlang.
- Learned Erlang
- Attempted to get through SICP, punted.
- Sponsored RubyNation
- Sponsored a happy hour at RubyNation
- Sponsored Ruby DCamp
- Sponsored Barcamp DC
- Gave 1% to the planet.
- Rocked (or got rocked by) a couple man nights.
- Went to a lot of Bachelor Parties.
- Went to seven amazing weddings -- I think everyone is married now....
- Presented Concurrency and the Actor Model to DCRUG and NOVARUG.
- I built an application called PatentMint to better collaborate and attempt to automate most of the IP commericalization
- I built an application called LegalRuled that automates the entire workflow for small law firms, its being used by several small firms right now and am moving it into final production in the coming weeks.
- Had a crazy idea.
- Had an even crazier idea for a new web framework that I never got around to building.
- Had an even crazier still idea of directing a conference about JavaScript.
- Built a whole bunch of websites.
- Released a whole application in MacRuby as open source called HotJour.
- Caused trouble at a conference with HotJour.
- Presented the whole Dissident concept as a way to change the web at BarCamp DC and CloudCamp DC
- Open sourced a rails plugin.
- Built a digital life aggregator completely in JavaScript.
- Iterative Designs was on the front of GitHub
- Mentioned several times of major geek news sites
- Ran a successful business as best I could.
- Dealt with a client going Chapter 11.
- Helped my wife through being laid off from an architecture firm.
- Helped my wife set up her company
- Froze to death in a hotel room in the name of flowers (for her company).
- Helped my father through being laid off from his company.
- Came up with some amazing new ideas for security in a virtualized computing environment with my father.
- Became a leader in the Cloud computing arena by letting people know that home computers aren't so dumb any more.
- Made many new friends in the DC Metro area.
- Made many new friends across the US
- Made many new friends across the globe.
- Brewed my first batch of home brewed beer.
- Put my company on hold to work for another start up.
