It’s been a few years since a wrote a post reflecting on the past year and looking forward on the next, either because I wasn’t blogging much or I was just too busy to blog (at work or building our house). But neither should be a valid reason, so this year I’m picking up my pen again for you readers.
As most of you know, 2014 was a very busy year for me with a wedding and building our house. I’m very happy I did both, but wouldn’t do it for a second time. As with building software, building a house turns out to be a lot more work than I thought. As with software, finishing of the final parts takes proportionally a lot more time. We moved at the end of January as the house is in a ‘state you can live in’, but quite some extra hours were spent finishing off things and this will continue the next year as well … although at a much lower intensity than in 2014. I see it as a way to de-stress together with the biking I picked up again.
The year 2015 also brought me a new job. I’ve been working on Windows 8/8.1 full-time for 2.5 years and it was great, but moving into our new house made me want to find something closer to home. So I’ve returned to consultancy and was lucky to have my first assignment 10 minutes from home (and I hope the next one won’t be several hours of travel a day either). Not spending several hours in traffic jams and tuning down the time spent on our house meant I had a lot more time to code at night. We finished a few nice projects (can’t disclose them though) for AppCreativity, I became active again on StackOverflow and I was able to spend time working on Prism (which I used the past 2+ years at my previous job) helping to get version 6 out. Somewhere in October, the team asked me to become “advisor”, which I gladly accepted.
The increased time I could spend at night coding for ourselves and the community brought another great reward: while having dessert on New Year’s day, I received following mail from Microsoft announcing that I received a MVP award for Windows Development. Although I knew it could happen (you have to fill in your contributions after being nominated), I wasn’t really expecting it. Needless to say I am very honored to receive the award and grateful to everyone who nominated me.
So what’s up for 2016? I would say a lot more of the same. Recognition is the best way to motivate someone. There are still improvements to be made in Prism, questions to be answered on StackOverflow and we still got a few apps to finish (some are long overdue). And I’m sure my daytime job will have a few challenges waiting for me as well. I wish you all the best for 2016!