I suppose waiting until 11PM on December 31st is as good a time as any for an end of the year wrap up post, right?

2009

The year really started early February for me with my Grandfather passing away. I’ve had relatives pass away before, but this was different. This was someone I was really close to and saw all the time. His death was sudden and was really hard to get past - not only for myself, but for the rest of my family. I don’t think I’m over it yet and I’m not sure I ever will be.

The rest of the year, I buried myself in work. I would say that my Grandfather’s death was the reason, but to be honest, I’ve been burying myself in work since as far back as I can remember, so maybe this was just an excuse.

Regardless, 2009 was a year of working hard - maybe too hard.

The year started wrapping up on December 18th with my last day of new development on gawkk. It’s been a long road. I was first hired by Gary to work on gawkk at the start of 2007. Working part time, I was able to lay the groundwork. By September of 2007, I had left a software engineering job I had been at for over six years to work full time on gawkk.

In the past two years, gawkk has grown and changed a lot. Towards the end, we were constantly trimming features and simplifying processes and user interaction. As it stands, I feel that gawkk is a superb video aggregator and discovery engine. Behind the scenes, it scours thousands of video hosting sites and automatically imports and categorizes everything it finds (millions of videos). For our end users, it provides a very simple way to share and discuss videos with their friends. Gawkk suppresses the noise from people you don’t care about, allowing the videos enjoyed by only your friends to surface just for you.

With that said, the time has come to let gawkk do its thing and focus attention elsewhere.

Other than working on gawkk full time through 2009, I’ve worked on a handful of very small freelance projects - all from clients I first did work for many years ago. I’ve released a few simple plugins and worked on a bunch of new side projects that have taken up most of my nights and weekends.

Twenty Ten

I’ll be starting the new year with an entire month of not doing any paid work. Instead, I will spend most days and nights slaving away on a couple of my side projects and reading every technical book I can get my hands on. Another one of my goals for this month is to completely refactor my mornings in an attempt to get a better work-at-home routine down. Lastly, I hope to squeeze in a couple of snowboarding day trips here and there, because there is nothing more relaxing to me than sitting at the top of a snow covered mountain.

I hope to have my new morning routine all straightened out when February comes, because I’m lucky enough to be starting a brand new project with Gary. We’re completely changing direction with this project and I’m really excited to get rolling. It’s going to be really fun to use some of the new things in the Rails ecosystem that I’ve had my eye on as well as just getting to start a new, fresh project (I’m looking at you, Rails 3!). In addition to new Rails specific things, we plan on using AWS for our entire infrastructure. Everything from EC2 and RDS to S3 and CloudFront. I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on that infrastructure. Everything Amazon has been doing with their Web Services continues to impress me. Just the other day they released object versioning for S3 - really neat stuff.

Aside from my plan, I hope that the Rails community continues to thrive and that, for everyone’s sake, this economy picks up in 2010.

Happy New Year!