The year I tried really hard

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I realize its already half way through the month, but I needed to get the obligatory year in review out. I had to bother. Why? Because last year was BIG. I ended 2008 leaving my former job to pursue greater things. My big goal for the year was to do awesome work, start building a reputation, and give back to the community. I’m very proud to say I accomplished all of those. I did so by working my ass off. Straight hustling.

Highlights:

I can’t really complain. I’ve set some new big goals for this year. The biggest is bit of a step backwards. Last year, I worked a lot. A little too much if you ask my wife and some of my friends. So this year is the year of accomplishing a lot while working less. As much as I love coding, there are other things I love more. Namely, my wife. In an attempt to break it down into actual achievable goals:

  • Only work with clients that I want to work with. A side luxury of working my ass off is that I’ve been offered a bit more work then I can feasibly do myself. Which puts me almost exactly where I want to be – being able to work on projects I genuinely find fun and interesting. Lucky me!
  • Take it down a notch with the open source shenanigans. This is slightly unfortunate, but I’m almost as overwhelmed with open source projects as I am with client work. I’m not going to dump or stop supporting the popular highly used projects, like Sammy or qadmin, but some of the lesser known used ones are going to become unsupported and I’m going to try to slow down with creating new ones. Try.
  • Cook more, write more, read more, learn more, see more people. My new meetup/idea code should address some of these. Very excited for the first meeting next week. Buying a kindle has actually made me read way more. I’m trying to spend more time on actual dedicated learning.

At the end of 2010 I want to look back and think about how much fun I had and how much I learned. So, friends and colleagues, heres to those goals and a great new year.

2 Responses to “The year I tried really hard”

What a great year! I exactly understand your point having few open-source projects under my belt.

Focus only on OSS projects witch still greatly help in your current client work. Popularity is nice but it does not pay the bills. Anyway keep up great work!

hey aaron,

you had quite an impressive year!

i like your first goal for this year: “Only work with clients that I want to work with.”

i hope that someday i get to say the same thing.

– ernesto

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