The good year of 2008

Hi all !

I haven’t been very active lately due to partly beeing busy, partly resting. I feel that this year is the first one that I didn’t feel the Christmas spirit at all. I’m not a Christmas person usually, but this year time passed with a strange feeling of work left to be done.

I had a lot to do at work and I still am grinding at it, I have a lot of plans for personal development but never seem to get to them.

Well, let’s see what I’ve accomplished this year (this list is mostly for me, but I’m hoping some of you will share my joy):

- I started trying out some online ideas (starting is a very good thing; until this year I planned to start some things but never really got to it);

- I’ve lost some friends (life is life, and quoting a friend of mine, "after a certain age it is proved that you can keep so many friends at one time…);

- I’ve made some friends;

- I started learning more things about photography, I have around 6k photos taken so far, still haven’t changed my first camera which is a Nikon D40, but have bought some glass like the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 XR Di II and the Sigma 10-20 f/4-f/5.6 EX DC HSM lenses;

- I took my Master’s Degree in Project Management (ASE Bucuresti - "MIP Online" programme);

- I changed my job, from ARond to Netbridge Development;

- I met new people working the Romanian online industry;

- I started working on my social networking skills, building my LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr profiles and planning to do Facebook, Digg, Reddit next year;

- I developed a number of websites, mostly presentation sites and a couple of portals, but most notably my ~~girlfriend’s~~ fiancee’s dental information portal;

- I developed an admin panel generator, which can create grid-like table listings of database data, editing, adding and deleting, all done from a configuration array;

- I started using Zend Framework and am planning to better myself in it (I also have a few ideas for platforms to be developed in ZF);

- I started learning all I can about online marketing and PPC Campaigns, mostly Google Adwords so far;

- I took the GAP Exam and I am now a Google Qualified Individual, although I’m having problems maintaining the spending limit of $1,000 / 3 months… I’ve got to find some clients fast!

- I read a number of books, mostly PHP related, but also some reference literature and science fiction books like "The Peter Principle" and "Ender’s Game" (Amazon must love me by now, not because of these two puny links, but because I bought around 20-30 books from them this year, most of them I didn’t have the time to read so far;

- I’ve satisfied all my hardware freak needs and wants, which I have to say has given me some perspective and opportunity to obsess on coding rather than the latest gadget to appear; The IT/electronics/gadgets freak in me is hard to handle some times and just having that stuff has chilled me down (I’m sure some of you know and share this feeling of needing something very badly);

- Also having realized that I’m never going to contain my inner hardware freak, I decided to turn it into an opportunity, which is the above link to www.hardwarefreak.ro; I plan on building a community of… well… freaks (not pun intended), a tribe (like Seth Godin would say) targeted towards Romanian hardware aficionados. I started with a forum just to see if there is interest for a community like this and will develop it into something much bigger if it starts to grow!

- I took a 6 day holiday by car, visiting Vienna and Budapest; the accomplishment here is that I drove all the way going and returning to Bucharest, totaling around 2,500 kilometres, with no incident whatsoever, which was a confirmation for me that I can take on bigger distances next year; (oh yeah before I forget, I used Dopplr to detail my trip so this is yet another social network)

- last but not least I decided to get married and will do so next year on February 21st 2009 !

I think these are my biggest accomplishments this year, but I’m sure I skipped a few smaller ones. I have to be honest, when I started writing this post 1 hour ago, I wasn’t sure I’d have so much to write. Seeing all that I’ve done makes me proud and gives me confidence that next year will be an even better year in spite of the upcoming world recession and crisis predictions !

All that remains now is to (~~wait~~)work and see, ’cause nothing comes free in this world…

Happy New Year to you all and may all your dreams come true in the next year !

Share and Enjoy: