2013 Year in Review
This is my fifth “year in review” post since starting this blog, which is kind of a milestone itself I suppose. It’s interesting to look back at all of the previous ones and see just how much has changed. While sadly it hasn’t been a good year for blogging (only 4 posts) it’s definitely been an incredible year by all other measurements.
This year continued to build on the momentum of the last. It was my second year working out of of .NET. I’m continuing to do web development on Ruby and Rails but find myself largely focused on HTML, JS/Coffeescript and CSS working with AngularJS (I’ve actually run a couple of tutorials on Angular).
We held a second hugely successful Polyglot Conference and the Polyglot Beers meetup (which replaced ALT.NET Beers) is probably the largest regular social meetup for developers in the city. The Polygot non-profit has also expanded somewhat and is providing logistics support and acting as a non-profit for other conferences in Vancouver like Devops days and CascadiaJS.
This was also my first year working full-time on my own startup WealthBar. We’ve now raised a some seed funding and have a team of five. If everything goes according to plan we should be open for business in a few months. (In the meantime you can signup early and get a free financial plan.)
This year I’ve also managed to successfully commit to serious exercising something that up until this point in my life had been a struggle. A big help with comitting to self improvement has been working with a personal coach, Scott Ward. I’ll probably write a bit more about that experience in the near future, suffice to say, having someone hold me accountable to my efforts to develop better habits and stay focused on my goals has been invaluable.
Going forward here are some habits I want to focus on this year:
- Reading daily (at least 30 minutes and books not internet news sites)
- Writing at least every other week (either for WealthBar or this blog)
- Serious studying at least a couple of times a week, specifically around investing and finance. I’m considering doing the Canadian Securities Course to start and considering getting a financial profession designation.
As for 2014, it’s looks like it’s going to be to be as exciting as ever. Cheers and happy new year everyone!