I’ve had a lot of false starts with writing posts lately. Writers blocks seems to have gotten the best of me, but I figured I’d do a post to reflect on the past 12 months.

This year I turned 30, which makes me feel a little strange. I’m no longer the young guy. Up until 2 years ago I was always the youngest guy on the team I worked on at work, now I’m the oldest guy (though in fairness, the team I’m currently on is only 3 people).

I also became a dad this year (2012-12-09), which is pretty cool. I wont bore you with any mushy revelations or talk about how it’s changed me – I honestly still feel like the same person. However, it is amazing to look over at the little guy and know that he’s got half my DNA. It’s also fun to wonder what kind of person he’ll be. Hopefully I can steer him in the right direction and help him become the best person that he can be.

PHP

I learned a lot about web development this year. Both on my own, by experimenting with new HTML5 APIs and browser tools, and at work. To speak in general terms, at work I’m a developer on two web applications – one based in Java Spring and one based in PHP. Working with the two side by side, I’ve slowly grown to hate Java web development – it’s slow for iterating changes, lends itself to gigantic class hierarchies, and seems to make trivial tasks harder than they should be. Even though it has its flaws, PHP is actually pretty fun to develop in. It also has great documentation and it seems like there is a blog post or forum question on anything you’d possibly want to do with it.

I still prefer the front-end though, and I’m still not sure I want to rely on PHP every time I do something on the back-end. One of my goals for next year is to take a serious look at Node.js, Python, and Ruby, and to do a for-fun project in each. I’ve actually started this already, but got a little side tracked when the baby showed up.

Internet Archive Fund Raiser

The Internet Archive is doing a donation drive with a 3-to-1 match. The archive was of great help to this site a few years ago when I underwent the one-two punch of my hard drive crashing and then my old web host deleting my site. Thanks to their Way Back Machine, I was able to recover a lot of files (in fact, it’s the reason the VB sections to this site are still up). I threw a couple of bucks their way out of appreciation, and I figured I’d pass on the link to anyone else who was interested in helping them out. They’re almost at their goal of raising 150k.