Happy 2013
To bring in the New Year and re-invigorate my writing I’ve exported my blog from Wordpress to Pelican. The transition has been less than smooth. First I had to create a patch to the importer in order to be able to import my articles and retain their formatting. I think I got it right for the most part, but it’s still lacking in a few corner cases (which I hope to correct in the next few days). Then I had to go through the pain of developing a theme for it (there are some pre-made ones but I found them less than satisfactory… and even this one needs some work in the responsiveness department). After much fiddling with regular expressions and munging of text I finally got it to a point that I’m happy to publish (and will be polishing).
This time of the year is a time for reflection and as I went through this process I’ve had the pleasure to re-read many of my old posts. I must say that reviewing the last year is not so bad. Reviewing the last five has been quite painful. However it’s nice to see how far I’ve come and for that I am thankful.
2012
What did I do in 2012?
Well, I turned 30.
I attended my first Pycon and subsequently visited California for the first time. I had the opportunity to meet some of the people I’ve only ever talked to through commit messages or IRC. There were also a few good talks. And the weather was great compared to back home!
When I got home I received the wonderful news that I was going to be a father! As soon as I walked in the door my wonderful wife handed me a present: a cute, green little baby outfit. It had a print of a white owl on the front.
I ran the Spartan Sprint. They surprised us the day of the race by changing the length to seven kilometers. Never the less I made great time and had a lot of fun.
I started Knockblock. It’s an implementation of the Bloom language as a DSL in Python. I then presented my findings at pycon.ca (I’ll be following up with more posts on Knockblock later).
I meant to start working on a game when I thought I couldn’t play Diablo 3. It turned out that I could play it. It hasn’t stopped me entirely but I did lose a lot of time.
I left Polar Mobile and took up a contract with Internap to work on OpenStack. I made some contributions to Cinder and Tempest and learned a lot about what it takes to deploy a cloud. I still roll my eyes at the term, “cloud,” but I think there’s a lot of cool technology that will fall out of its continued development.
On November 25th I became a father to a baby girl. I’ve been pretty busy with that ever since. And I’m looking forward to the rest of it. She’s a really awesome and I love being a dad.
I also became debt-free this year and have some savings in the bank!
Looking Ahead
I don’t have everything figured out yet but there are a few things I already know I’d like to try and accomplish this year:
- Climb the Chief
- Find a home to fit my family (our 2 bedroom apartment is getting a little cramped).
- Find something to do that I can commit the next portion of my life to. I’d like to find a really serious project to work on. I think the first part of this year is going to involve a serious amount of reflection.
I hope that this time next year I will have plenty more to report. For now it’s time to get back the little one.