In a couple of hours it is midnight and we will turn the page to welcome a new year. At this time of year I like to reflect on what has passed. I believe this is important to better cherish the good parts and learn to avoid the bad parts in the future.
I structure my daily work using the Scrum methodology and I find this to be a great framework. This includes a retrospective session at the end of every sprint. So what would be a better format for my reflections of 2011?
What stands out from the year?
I hired my first employee, Joakim Lundberg.
I left and sold off Kollegorna, the web bureau I started two years ago.
I started consulting full time for Unibet to help them with their Drupal based multisite platform.
I invested more time and effort in Symfony and helped start our Swedish community.
I committed to completing and launching Smartburk.
I decided to give Vim a honest try and started using it full time since June.
What was the most fun?
Becoming part of a new team with many different backgrounds and skills. I have learned a lot from working with Unibet and its many consultants.
Keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, past colleagues and clients has been very valuable to me. Thanks for all the beer and chats!
When I left Kollegorna I got A LOT of job proposals. Hearing from all those employers and being treated to all those lunches was a major confidence boost.
Also I must mention Symfony2. It has really brought back the fun and passion for web development for me.
What would you do again?
Quitting Kollegorna and taking on a long term, full time contract with a major enterprise was a big step for me. I had made the small web bureau a part of my identity and I my partners was my friends. But realizing I had to take that step was, I believe, very important.
Vim has proven to be really powerful and it already helps me a lot in my day-to-day work. Seeing how I spend a big chunk of my time in my editor I find it wise to try and optimize the experience.
What could be improved?
I could better my focus on completing, launching and improving Smartburk and other projects. I think some crunching and scope shrinking will help getting Smartburk launched, after which I will hopefully have some users to make it less abstract and more fun.
I would like to have an even deeper technical knowledge and know better what happens on a lower level. This requires hands-on experience, which in turns calls for a fun new project. I will queue this up for some time after Smartburk is out.
These last seven months has been very rewarding but they have also made me realize that “the enterprise” is not a setting I thrive in for longer periods of time. I prefer working in smaller organizations, naturally connected to the open source community. I have no concrete solution for moving more towards this but I will definitely try to this coming year.