So my week started off with a question “On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the year professionally?”. It did not take too long to say 10 out of 10. I have achieved pretty much everything I set out to and more. It has been an interesting year personally and professionally. Much change and many new and interesting people to meet.

Having worked for two years at home in Virginia as a remote worked, PSC offered me a new position based out of the main office in Schaumburg IL (just outside of Chicago). The offer was too good to refuse and as soon as school finished in June this summer we moved northwards. My thanks go to John Quirk and the other partners within PSC for having the faith and belief in me that I am worth it.

In Schaumburg I have been able to get closer to “the business” and further away from “core development”. While my day to day role has not significantly changed my outlook on it has. I have happily come to terms with “managing” projects within the Collaboration Practice and after having delivered two year long projects to my main customer, I do not have an significant code contributions to either project. The startling thing is I am perfectly OK with that! I love being a developer and I don’t want to stop. The blogging and research into new areas and fields of interest has kept me happily going throughout the year within project code to work on.

This year, as part of the IBM ICS brand community, I:

• Presented twice at Connect 2014 in January
  • Worklight (with John Jardin)
  • ExtJS and working with large data in XPages
• April: Presented a TLCC Webinar – with Jesse and Ulrich –  Speeding up Domino designer and general questions.
  • This was subsequently turned into a very successful NotesIn9 video
• In August I presented at MWLUG in Grand Rapids, MI
  • Angular.js and XPages
• In November I found out that my x$ XSnippet was officially incorporated into the latest ExtLib release !!!
• November I found out that I would be speaking in Orlando again next year with Mark Leusink
• November I was also very honoured to find out I had been nominated as an IBM ICS Champion for 2015
• I blogged a total of 78 times (just up from last year) with a hit count of nearly 80,000 (up a full 33% from last year)

Blogging themes

• The theme for the year I decided was Angular.js. I needed to learn it and understand it as I knew it was going to come into play in our projects.
• I also wondered into Bluemix in a significant manner and then eventually websockets. With the impending addition of an XPages buildpack into Bluemix I do believe I have a theme for next year (assuming I don’t have a squirrel moment)
• Along with Bluemix came an excuse to start working with node.js which I had been promising myself for a long time. Websockets is a very good base to start playing with node and its capabilities and there is more of that to come.

So THANK YOU is owed to many people who have made this year such a great one for me.

• Every person who submitted my nomination as an IBM Champion – I know of at least 6 people who did. I am very flattered and humbled for you to think of me. It is good to have a voice, but encouragement to continue always helps 🙂
• PSC Group
  • Troy Reimer, Mark Scherer and Toby Samples who have for the most part up with me the entire year on one project or another
  • Kathy Brown and Brad Balassaitis who are just the best Agony Aunts a dont-wanna-be manager could possibly hope to call his friends 🙂
  • Andrew Barickman, who’s mentoring and leadership have taught me a lot this year.
  • John Head who continues to surprise me with his knowledge and understanding. (and bought me the most expensive dinner of the year 😉 )
  • All the new faces I have met at PSC but never really interacted with before, Norm, Dan, Steve, John, Steve, Ken, Shil, Tim, and others.
  • John Bigenwald, for repeatedly reminding me that there are larger egos than mine at the company.
• David Leedy
  • As much of a pompous fool that man can be, he is still instrumental in me being able to do what I want to socially. I hope it is clear to everyone who knows both of us that David is a very good friend 😉
• Russ Maher
  • Russ has always been a community supporter and friend, but this year he went above and beyond by inviting my family and I over for July 4th at his house with family. We had only been in the area a few weeks and knew virtually no-one in the area. We didn;t even know where to go for fireworks. His whole family was very welcoming and we were very fortunate to be invited. We regularly drive past his street and my kids go “that’s Mr Russ’ street”. Very significant for them in feeling welcome in a new place. Thank you !!
• Richard Moy who organized MWLUG and everyone else in the community who organizes a user group
• Multiple random community members ( I know I will forget some ) who have been fun to interact with and I have learned from this year:
  • Oliver Busse, Nathan Freeman, Jesse Gallagher, Declan (thanks for the drinks) Lynch, Eric (smiley) McCormick, Mark Leusink, John Jardin, Per Lausten, Ryan Baxter, Steve Zavocki, Paul Withers, Brice Elgort, Sven Hasselbach….et al
• I know developers in at least the following countries – and that makes this all so cool
  • USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, England, Ireland, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Turkey, Italy, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and others I am sure

Finally to everyone reading this – I have to admit that a readership of zero would be pretty discouraging and would make me want to find something else to talk about. Thanks for reading and considering this relevant to your day. I hope you enjoy the time with families this New Year and here’s to 2015 !!

 

THANK YOU 🙂