2008 in Review

What a fantastic year. What a crazy year. I don't think there's ever been a year in my life so filled with change. For starters, I...

• Learned Erlang
• Joined Twitter and FriendFeed
• Drove 3 hours to caucus in Iowa (what a strange ritual that is!)
• Met some really cool people at PyCon 2008
• Became involved in the Pinax project
• Wrote and released my first 7 open source Django applications
• Guest hosted a podcast
• Learned how to use Git
• Graduated from college with bachelor's degree in Computer Science
• Accepted a job offer with Mochi Media
• Moved to San Francisco
• Released a series of 14 screencasts building a project from the ground up
• Wrote one blog post every day in the month of November
• Quit drinking soda
• Participated in the most notable election of my lifetime
• Started a Django San Francisco local user group

...but those are just the highlights. It's been really interesting transitioning from college student to the real world. Somehow I thought that not having homework would mean that I would have more free time to do other things, but it turns out that you actually have less time if you have a job to go to every day.

But I don't think that being a student ever stopped. I've learned so much from my coworkers: different ways of thinking about problems, theoretical problems, real world challenges, prioritizing work, RESTful principles of the web, and a whole lot about databases. This is what I like about this industry. However much you know, there's more to learn, and people are generally willing to share their expertise with you.

I've learned a lot about what it means to be part of a community; part of a company. I've learned a lot about life, this year.

But the learning's not over.

Goals for 2009

While I'm weary of posting my goals for all the world to see, I think it's important to codify them and make them public. That way, maybe it'll compel me to actually follow through on these goals. I've tried to keep them realistic and with a few exceptions, specific enough to be testable. Without further ado, here are my goals for 2009 (in no particular order):

• Learn a concatenative/stack-based language
• Meet new people, especially those that I wouldn't normally meet
• Write a virtual machine
• Double both my blog and Twitter followership
• Be more consistent in my contributions to the Pinax project, instead of helping in fits and spurts like I currently am
• Post at least twice a month to this blog
• Release some non-open source software, and maybe even charge for it
• Work out an average of 2 times a week or more over the whole year
• Learn Processing
• Learn about investments, and invest 10% of my earnings each month
• Give a talk at a conference

I think that all of these goals are achievable. In fact, I'd like to do more than just what I listed here, but these are the ones I'm willing to commit to. Frankly, I can't wait to see how this year shapes up. If it turns out to be anything like last year, I'm in for quite a ride.