This year was a great year with lots of changes. I changed directions with my own company and hired someone to help me out with it. And I got myself a real job at 1&1 to help them out with their hosting platform to improve everything that involved WordPress.
WordPress core
This year I contributed back to 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8. In total I contributed back to 7 releases now. This year I didn’t do much in patches but more in reading all change sets and checking that. In total I had 16 props and a few commits to the unit tests. This year I had most of the time a fight with myself with helping out and disagreeing with the decisions that are made.
GlotPress
This year I started contributing back to GlotPress what in a result made me project lead of it. It was kind a dead and only a few changed were made the last year. This year I did manage to make some major and minor changes to it. Currently working on several ideas that I can start working on in the next months to make it work even better.
WordCamps
This year I attended six WordCamps and a lot of other WordPress related events. I was able to speak at four WordCamps: Europe, Sofia, Lancaster and Norway. Exactly the same as 2012. I traveled a bit less to the US what for me is a bit of a win. It’s always great to be there but the trip is a long one. It was great to meet most of the people I know from the US in my own country during WordCamp Europe. And was even able to speak together with Mike Schroder with who I have a lot of contact since we worked together on WP_Image_Editor.
CodeKitchen/ArtistPress
In March I started my incorporate business CodeKitchen. Till now nothing special did happened yet except that in October I did hired my first employee. Together we are now working hard to make ArtistPress happening. A site where musicians can create their own online presence. We did launch the landingspage and had positive feedback on that.
1&1
In November I started my new job at 1&1. They hired me to make their WordPress platform better and also let me almost fulltime contribute back to WordPress. This job fits perfectly in my plans for the upcoming years. Part of my job is speaking at WordCamps and that is something I love to do. I also spoke at my first PHP conference this year because of my new job.
Code Contributions
I did a lot of code contributions this year to a lot of small plugins. Builded a few own plugins for database abstractions, trying to help out with WP CLI and plugins like BP Labs, Elasticsearch plugins and Babble. Most of them can be found on my GitHub account.
Plans for 2014
For 2014 I did already some ground work and can’t wait for the new year to come. December always feels like one big holiday month due the fact that it’s hardly impossible to go to WordCamps. I tried this year but due a christmas party at 1&1 I couldn’t make it to WordCamp Sevilla.
My wish is the same as Mario Peshev’s:
My only real wish is for health and prosperity to my family, friends, colleagues and fellows around. It’s the only important thing out there and it’s the base of everything else.
My goals for next year are:
- The biggest one is supporting more charity causes. I always donated a decent amount of money to it but I would love to be more meaningful then only spending money.
- Contribute more to WordPress Core. I did great things in 3.4 and 3.5 but after that I spent more them on GlotPress and plugins.
- Contribute more to related WordPress projects like .org sites and GlotPress
- Contribute daily to projects on GitHub. This will be mostly be code changes but can be issue reports and comments on issues.
- Share my knowledge at WordCamps all over the world like Africa and Asia. Presenting at at least 10 of them.
- Get my first big client for CodeKitchen.
- Getting ArtistPress done and having more then 1000 artists using it.
- Improve my server skills. I always played with it but I want to step up a bit to understand things like multi server setup.
- Releasing my first own iOS app. I have already a lot of them published but as part of my job and not under my own name.
- Blogging more on my own blog and on WP Unknown. Like I did quite a few presentations this year but I never blogged about those subjects. Target will be 1 post per day.
- Having my own or be a part of a WordPress or CMS based Podcast. I love it to be connected on a weekly/monthly based with the community and just talk about all kinds of things.
This are my goals and hopefully I can accomplished them all. But in the end most of them don’t matter much if you aren’t happy in life. I do wish all of you a merry christmas and an awesome 2014.