2008 Retrospective

2008 was a great year.

A lot of fun things happened. I started speaking more. I started using linux as my desktop. Obama won. I played with XMPP manically. I built some neat applications and Threadless continued to be awesome.

On my blog, the following entires got a decent amount of attention:

• Chicago Transit API - Oct. 6th - Reverse engineered and built a proxy for the CTA Bustracker.
• Mini Hi Fi: The Chase - Aug. 30th - Built a mini stereo. Audiophile addiction avoided!
• Excla.im - a replacement jabber bot - Jul. 13th - Built a small jabber bot to update twitter.
• Social XMPP - Mar. 25th - Initiated a conversation with the venerable Peter St. Andre to start up the social xmpp list.
• OLPC Chicago Jabber Server - Mar. 2nd - Built a jabber server for hosting various OLPC related community activities.
• Awesome Hosting Options - Mar. 2nd - Outlined what I use for hosting. A rather popular post. A bit outdated. I need to update it.
• The Mosso Cloud: Requests are not a good metric - Feb. 29th - I was unhappy with how mosso had set about charging us for usage. Mosso is still a good host and is still struggling with this issue.
• Google Apps Auth: XMPP and Radius idea - Feb. 25th - I wrote about how I wanted a radius endpoint for my google apps account. It would make a bunch of stuff easier for me. My solution was to hack a radius server to auth over our Google Apps talk/XMPP account.
• Putting the blame on your vendors for the win. - Jan. 22nd - I was unhappy with how some internet peers had blamed their vendor when equipment failures resulted in downtime. I think that people should stand behind their decisions and if there is an error - they should take responsibilities. It is weak to blame a vendor.

The theme seemed to be XMPP and Hosting - which, if you have hung out with me recently,  is rather close to what i like to talk about in real life ;). I think that I will continue this trend into 2009, but hopefully blog about it more.

I did notice that I ended up blogging less this year than almost any year before (2008: 30 entries, 2007: 84 entries, 2006: 154 entries, 2005: 166 entries, 2004: 275 entries, 2003: 290 entries, 2002: 266 entries, 2001: 103 entries, 2000: 27 entries). I have been blogging for about 8 years for a total of about 1395 entries - which means that this 1 year accounts for about ~2% of my blog entries. haha. I am guessing that 2% accounts for about 90% of my blog traffic. I am not a new years resolution type of guy, but I would like to blog more regularly. Hopefully get my percentage up a bit. maybe 100 posts. It isn’t THAT hard. ;)

To offset the lack of blogging, I twittered a lot. In fact, I updated twitter around 3251 times (this number is approximate because of the twitter api and paging). Of the 3251 tweets, 852 were replies. I replied to paulsmith the most with 25 replies. ryankanno was second with 20 replies. I said awesome around 249 times. I talked about sleep 71 times. I mentioned Hiromi 122 times. I said fuck about 46 times. I talked about work 238 times.  My fake new years resolution about twitter is to stop having twitter steal blog entries. I saw that written somewhere and I laughed at how often that happens. I think of a blog and instead just twitter about it. It kills the entry and doesn’t flesh out my thoughts as much. I think the best plan is to integrate and use both mediums to develop a post.

My flickr usage dropped significantly this year. Kind of a bummer because i LOVE taking pictures. Hiromi is currently telling me that we don’t take enough picture together.  It looks like i took only ~800 pictures in 2008. I blame this on the iPhone and how slow its camera is. In previous years i have used shozu and a 360 device. This let me upload picture directly after i took them and most often in the background. I need to take more pictures. I wish i had more insight into my flickr pictures. I need to build out my archive a bit more to keep track of everything like i did with twitter. It is quite handy.

Work was awesome in 2008. We had some large projects that launched a bit rougher than i would have liked, but they turned out awesome. Typetees.com, theselectseries.com, threadlesskids.com and the new threadless.com are all awesome. The team that worked on them are all amazing. I couldn’t ask for a better team of technologists, production people, operations people and warehouse people to help make technology at Threadless be awesome.  I can’t wait to see what is in the pipeline for 2009.

Seriously - 2008 was a great year. I can’t wait to see what 2009 brings. I hope more fun, more blog entires, more tweets and more pictures.