2006 Year in Review

I’ve been trying to get this post out for the last few days without success, but I figure I better get it out now before anythng too exciting happens for 2007. The idea behind the post was to gather a list of items that I saw as significant occurences in my life for 2006; it’s not a complete list neccessarily, but pretty good look at things. To that end:

30 In January I turned 30. Really this isn’t a big deal to me, but in general society thinks it is important, so it’s probably worth noting.

The Book February saw the release of [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590595475?tag2=zillablog-20 Begining PHP and PostgreSQL 8], a book I co-authored with [http://www.wjgilmore.com/ Jason Gilmore]. Writing a novel is something everyone says they want to do in thier life, and for me this was certainly the way I wanted to go about marking off that todo item on my life list.

pgsummit Early July saw the 10 year Anniversary, which included my first trip back to Toronto in more than 10 years to attend the [http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/07/10/1723251&from=rss postgresql developers summit]. The highlight was of course getting to meet a whole bunch of people I’d none online for years.

spi participation Shortly after the annivesary I was elected as the spi board observer for the postgresql project. To date we haven’t done alot with our SPI membership, but I think it has brought PostgreSQL some positive exposure within the FLOSS community, and has given us some structure to move forward on several advocacy efforts.

oscon Rounding out July was another trip to Portland. This wasn’t my first oscon, but presenting on Ruby rather than PostgreSQL gave it a whole new spin, plus having Dave Thomas, among others, sitting in the back of the presentation was certainly a bonus.

Dylan starts school My 5 year old started kindergarden, and after a year of pre-school (kudos to vpk) that was fairly rocky, kindergarden was even worse. Had things stayed as they were I don’t know how things would have turned out, but fortunatly life was about to change for the better.

OmniTi In September I agreed to pack my bags and move to Maryland to work at OmniTi. One of the big factors in coming was the chance to work with some really smart people on a regular basis, but I was pleasently surprised to see the caliber of talent extend beyond the “name” employees out to the whole staff. Plus there’s the odd similarity to how I got hired by OmniTi and how I got married which I get to sit back and think about.

PHP/DB|Works Technically I went to php/db|works before I started working at OmniTi, but it was after my last day at WebMD. International travel tip #1: Never tell the customs agent you’re unemployed when they ask you what your job is. In any case, I again got to visit Toronto and met a whole bunch more people whom I had always wanted to meet, I got to speak on plphp, and was all around impressed with the conference crew; I’ll have to do another php conference before long.

google soc summit In October I went to Mountain View for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit on behalf of the PostgreSQL project. Again I met lots of interesting people (see a theme here?) and swapped a lot of good ideas which I hope to help put into action at the next Summer of Code. Also of note it was my first time at Google, a place I strongly recommend any tech developer check out should they get the opportunity.

worked the booth at LISA Though I had been to several conferences this year, I hadn’t done much booth duty for some time, but since LISA was local I thought it wasa good opportunity to pitch in some help (and meet some new folks, but you’re sick of that line by now). I enjoyed the conference, but probably more memorable was the subway system and my walk through some back alleys to the out of the way parking lot I ended up in in Silver Springs…

ppa 4.1 beta So normally a beta release would not be a significant mile stone, but with Chris leaving the project (and leaving me in charge) while I was in the midst of an interstate move, we passed the one year mark between releases and I really wanted to get that thing out so people could see there was some life in the project. I made it just under the gun, and I’m happy to say since the beta we’ve gotten some bug reports and some nice cleanup work being done which helps make it all worthwhile; now we just need to get those translations updated.

So that about rounds out 2006; looking back no wonder I felt so compressed for time. And what about 2007? I’m on the hook to help out with pgcon and I’ve been thinking about working on another book project, but otherwise I’ve no concrete plans, which is probably OK, since I didn’t have any at the start of 2006 either.