Personal
The past
Well, first dealing with personal, what to say about this. I do know the start was interesting. I got sued by my old boss because of my talk at WordCamp Norway. I didn’t do anything wrong except that I even once worked at a fucked up company like that. But yeah lesson learned and from now on I always work with great people or I’m running away.
I also learned a lot of the thing I do and love. Traveled a lot to WordCamps, conferences and places I loved to explorer. I even wat able to speak at 4 WordCamps and 1 meetup and improving every time I present.
Also start sporting a bit again. Played some tennis tournaments where I always lost the first round but still I see improvements every time and for now that counts.
The future
This year I have great plans. Going to move to Amsterdam. I said that already a few times but this time I mean it and this is my first and most important priority for this year. By doing this I also going to put more energy in having an own real company. With this I mean that I want to have clients directly instead through an agency. I already have some great plans and already talking with the people I want to work with. So hopefully this month there will be a blog post about what this is.
I also would love to play handball again. It’s the sport I love and hopefully be able to play again. Soon I will train again to get my condition back on how it was several years ago. I also thinking to get a private trainer to improve my tennis game. It’s a game I like but need to learn the basic before my next tournament.
Also I would love to see most of my friends from my exchange I had in 2009 to Austria. For the rest I don’t have plans. I see how it goes and I’m sure this year is going to be great one.
WordPress
The past
Previous year was a blast. I really started contributing back to WordPress with version 3.4 on the XML-RPC. I did some minor things in 3.0 en 3.3 but not feature based. In 3.4 it was a nice start where I was working in a team with Max Cutler and Peter Westwood. With this work the XML-RPC is more useful right now and the mobile apps can do a little bit more then they use too. Also because of they great work of the mobile team. As a reward of my hard work I even was a recent rockstar for 3.4.
With 3.5 I worked on abstracting the image manipulation code. So we now don’t need to use GD but can use Gmagick, Imagick or some other library to make images smaller. What is a great feature to WordPress and a important step for photographers. This with the new nedia flow where the bigest code changes to WordPress 3.5. I learned a lot with it on how to design API’s and how to make it backwards compatible. It did caused two bugs where one is pretty serious. I created the bug even tho when I didn’t looked at the code I know it was wrong. Let’s see that as personal growth ;).
The future
I see myself as a contributing developers of WordPress. So for the next couple of releases I still will help with developing certain features. I would love to play with the new media flow and how to hook into that. I wanted to in 3.5 but the code was changing a lot and I don’t play that often with javascript so it would have been hard for me.
That said there are still some issues for me to address. In the last couple of months I had some opinion difference and I also hate that some things are discussing privately some things are just wrong. Hopefully I can help out to resolve those issues to create a better WordPress community.
Another thing is that I want to improve and professionalize the WordPress community in The Netherlands. At this moment there is a cool group of people hanging around at WordPress related events but there isn’t something continues. I’m now going to organize a meetup every two months but that will be it. Even WordCamp NL isn’t stable enough. It now seems like the end of this year what will cause to have a WordCamp NL every 18 months. Hopefully al this things will have a solid plan this year because that is something we need. We need to have a open community where someone can step up and help out.
WordCamps
The past
This year was a blast with WordCamps. I was at WordCamp Oslo, Netherlands, New York, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Lisbon and Toronto developers. Also I was invited to go to the Community summit in Tybee. I also spoken at Oslo, Netherlands, New York City and Toronto. So lots of cool stuff I learned there and most of the places where new to me.
The future
For now I will go to WordCamp Norway this month after that the plan is to visit only WordCamps in Europe and hopefully I can speak to some of them. One of the reason is that I would love to see how the WordPress communities are in Europe and be more involved in that.
I’m also planning to organize WordCamp Serbia. For now they denied it what is obviously a wrong decision. So I’m now planning a meetup and still planing the WordCamp. From the feedback I get from people inside and outside Serbia they really like the idea. Already have a lot of people wanting to help out. Even more then some WordCamps I went too. So that is a good sign and I’m pretty sure that the first WordCamp Serbia will be this year.
Blogging
No special headings needed here. Never really blogged so never really used WordPress. This year will and need to be different. I do a lot of cool stuff with WordPress and I believe that is worth blogging. So I’m now finding the right format, platform and people to do so. I do believe the idea I have is awesome and I do believe you people also thing that. So the next of couple of weeks I’m working on the idea/site and hopefully I’m be able to release it in the end of this month.