2011: Year in Review

The New Year has arrived, I wasn’t quite prepared to sum up my year on December 31^st because I was busy spending time with the kids during my, well deserved, one week off for the holidays.  This last year was probably the hardest year of my life.  At my current job, I stepped up and took on a big management role while being lead developer on multiple projects – for some reason I made this mistake again…

Even though this was a hard year, there certainly were big rewards.  I dove into some new technology with the Photon Socket Server from Exitgames; got back into C# and .NET; released two books and currently editing my third; watched my kids walk for the first time; visited Seattle twice and met one of the now former lead developers of MVC .NET; launched a new website (Webistrate – Draw your own conclusions) – very happy with the creative name on this one!; and many, many more things.

What did I learn this year?  Don’t bite more than you can chew!  Don’t make a major platform change during an extremely tight deadline!  Don’t carry your anger with you everywhere – the world truly isn’t out to get you, well maybe sometimes it is!  Interviewing people is not an overly enjoyable process, mostly because it takes 3 bad interviews for even 1 mediocre one.  However, the one that’s really good is always easy to pick from the bunch.  A few late hires were made at the end of the year that will be starting soon, hopefully all the hard interviewing will truly pay off and more fantastic people will join the team we are building.

That’s quite a bunch of negatives up there, but we do typically learn from our mistakes, so what about some positives?  Writing books are hard work; but a lot more fun than doing day-to-day development work.  When I write books, I find that I really take my time and think more about how I want to accomplish something because my solution will be used by many people in many different scenarios.  Blogging is also a lot of fun, but is probably more time consuming than book writing, blogs are typically successful because of repeat, good, quality content – hence why this blog is not allowing me to stay home every day and write (not that it’s not good quality of course :p that I unfortunately do not blog as much as I would like too!).

So what can we look forward to in 2012?  Well another book from me, this time on PhoneGap.  Mobile development and more specifically the adoption of HTML5 in the main stream (Microsoft, Adobe, etc…) will make it extremely important for us developers to focus more on attempting to build one codebase for many different platforms, not just the web anymore.  Instead we will need to develop for mobile devices (the one million and one different kinds of course), pad devices, even Windows 8 devices!

Hopefully from all of the lessons learned in 2011, this New Year will be a lot less stress free!