Following up on last years retrospective I thought it would be fun and useful to mull over what has passed and look ahead on what is yet to come. This year however I will deviate from the scrum sprint retrospective framework.
Forgive the egocentricity and please tag along for my highlights of 2012!
What stands out from the year?
I try to learn a new major technology each year and for 2012 this happened to become Haskell. I was reading the book Seven Languages In Seven Weeks when I came across the programming language. There and then I fell in love — truly a beautiful language!
This blog is not the only place where I publish my writing. I have written for printed magazines before too and in 2012 two of my articles were published in the New Relic blog.
Following an amazingly awesome vacation in Vietnam and Cambodia I was horrified to see the resulting beach photos of myself. Shortly thereafter I was weighing my food, hitting the gym and grinding the tracks. Eight months later and 15 kilo less, I am still hooked and glad to have made this my new lifestyle.
Professionally I took another big leap when I left my nice gig (and wonderful colleagues!) at Unibet. Since September I have been living life as a “web entrepreneur”, where I build my own products and services, hoping to make a living from them sometime.
I attended Symfony Live in Paris, where I learned a lot about my favorite web framework and met a bunch of cool people. The latter Music Hack Day in Iceland was also really inspirational.
As I began working out more seriously I also started blogging about my training and vegetarian nutrition. When I later on shifted gears towards fighting I branched out to a Mixed Martial Arts blog. My post-consulting life gave rise to a third, business and entreprenur blog and I have a fifth upcoming travelling blog. Writing is just really fun!
In November I was asked to mentor a group of students at Hyper Island. I had a lot of fun bouncing ideas with them and get see their projects coming to life.
My startup project for tracking tv-series finally went beta!
Resolutions for 2013
I do not like making new year resolutions but I do think it is important to keep planning ones future. In that spirit; here is what I want from 2013.
Keep controlling my own time, deciding for myself when I want to wake up, when I want to work long days and when I just want to stay home and play video games.
Together with my brother in arms, Viktor Miranda, I will make sure the tv-series site Smartburk.se will have a sharp release.
Instead of working solely with development and technology I want to keep doing business, product development, search engine optimization, content creation and all other “soft areas” around Internet ventures.
I would love for my other blogs to have the same kind of traffic as tobiassjosten.net does but starting with getting above 100 daily visitors feels like a realistic step towards that.
Doubtlessly I will keep working out but I would also like to go at least one Muay Thai fight and two Jujitsu fights. I will need ten times (!) that before I am allowed to go a Mixed Martial Arts fight.
Now I am already looking forward to finishing this year and get cranking for the next. But first, some proper celebration. Happy new year, folks!