2012: year in review

2012-12-29

I always enjoy reading patio11’s year in review posts, and while I didn’t take enough notes for this year to do a GOOD one, I figure that I should at least leave some notes so that when I do one next year, I’ll have something to benchmark against.

Ruby

This has been a whirlwind year for my career. My work with Jumpstart Lab is incredibly fulfilling, and makes sure my bills get paid.

I flew all over the world. I’ve always wanted to travel, and while I complain about it a lot, it’s truly wonderful to be able to go places. I now have the second highest Delta frequent flyer tier memebership. If you’d told me that three years ago, I’d have laughed at you.
I spoke at a lot of conferences, and gave my first keynote. More lined up for next year already. Speaking is something I love to do.
Teaching classes has been fantastic, and I’d love to do even more of it next year.
I now have commit access to Rails. I put in a lot of work over the last few months, and this means a lot to me. Last step: core. We’ll see if I ever get there.
I now have 22 gems, with Draper being my largest project, at almost 200,000 downloads.

Unrelated to Ruby, I was able to contribute to a wide variety of projects in a few languages this year, and now have 116 repos on GitHub. A lot of those are abandoned or old, but still, they’re all something I was doing something with this year.

Writing

I finally made the hypermedia book become a reality, and it’s done really well. Many people have told me that it has opened their eyes to a new way of doing things, and a bunch of startups have told me they’ll be releasing hypermedia APIs in 2013. Sales have been brisk: I don’t want to disclose exact numbers, but I will tell you that it’s in the 5 figure range. This has allowed me to start taking chunks out of my student loans: once they’re paid off, I will be super lean financially.

I made it to the Svbtle blog network, which is invite-only. I’ve gotten mostly good feedback about everything I’ve done there, which is pleasing.

I started a book to learn Rust programming last week, as a way of helping myself learn Rust, making some more money, and testing out a publishing workflow that might influence the next iteration of Designing Hypermedia APIs. I like it a lot.

Reading

I read a lot, though not as much as I’d like. I want to read 30 books this next year, and finally got into the habit of using GoodReads.

Etc

I had a really good year in other regards: fulfilling relationships, fun times, good food… not everything was spectacular, but overall, really good. I moved out of my hometown, finally, and that’s been really great. I’m back now for the holidays, and it feels so small…

The only really bad thing was the death of my father. That still has interesting effects on my life, but mostly in non-obvious ways. That’s all I’ll say about that.