In the same vein as last year, I’ll spend a post summing up on what happened this year, and then try to come up with some goals for the next year.

2011 retrospective

What did I do in 2011? Well, I

• Wrote 27 blog posts (+ this one = 28).
• Gave my “Frictionless Persistence in .NET with MongoDB” talk at Goto Copenhagen. Great experience, and Microsoft even recorded it.
• Gave the talk again as a free geek night.
• Hosted an Aarhus .NET User Group code camp on MongoDB.
• Gave the Frictionless talk again, this time at an Odense .NET User Group meeting.
• Made tiny contributions to Castle Windsor and MassTransit.
• Started building an NServiceBus-like service bus: Rebus. It already has pub-sub messaging and sagas 🙂
• Attended Udi Dahan’s “Advanced Distributed Systems Design With SOA” course. Udi was no stranger to me as I have been following his work, but the course presented some extremely interesting ideas on how to build a service-oriented architecture.
• Spent most of my time monkeying around with code and architecture on the PowerHub project, which is getting more and more serious. Oh, did I mention that the system’s regulation parts have zero downtime? With a nifty master-slave setup with automatic failover, PowerHub can continue to optimize and control local units, even in the face of system and platform upgrades… 🙂
• Got a new job!!! Yes, that’s right: The 30th of December 2011 will be my last day as a Trifork Software Pilot! On January the 2nd in the new year, I’ll join d60 as a consultant. This fact deserved a dedicated blog post. 🙂
• Had my photo of a hard-wired hairdryer included in Mark Seemann’s book about DI in .NET (see page 8 in chapter 1). Needless to say, this photo went right into my slidedeck 🙂

If I compare that to my 2011 resolutions, I think I’m only missing a “real” pet project. The closest thing is PriorityQ, which I made as an example app for my MongoDB presentations – it’s a “question collector” that can be used during presentations.

2012 resolutions

This is what I’d like to do in 2012:

• Gain a footing in my new position, and help out with some of the company’s challenges.
• Attend a couple of conferences – in passive as well as in active mode.
• Contribute some more to some of the OSS projects I like – including my own.
• Put Rebus to (some serious ab)use.

and, most importantly – just like my 2011 resolutions – I’d like to continue to be inspired by communicating with smart people.

Lastly, I will express my feelings in the form of an animated GIF that reeks of 1996: Now, let’s see what 2012 brings…

As I’m writing this, I have spent 4 years and 9 months working at Trifork. That means a majority of my professional experience comes from working there, and I must say that it has been a fantastic time!

Throughout the years, I have been allowed to work on interesting projects, attend conferences, speak, teach, and play, and thus continually be challenged – and almost be forced to grow.

When I read Chad Fowler’s “My Job Went To India” (which later became “The Passionate Programmer”), the “Be The Worst” chapter immediately made sense to me, because I think that pretty much describes me when I started working with Trifork. If you haven’t read it, please do yourself a favor and do it – it’s available online.

As Chad puts it: “The people around you affect your own performance. Choose your crowd wisely”.

So, if you’re looking for an inspiring environment and some extremely talented colleagues, Trifork is definitely a great place to be. Especially as a .NET developer, I think Trifork can offer a healthy exposure to Java, ObjectiveC, Riak, Erlang, Ruby, and more non-.NETty things, which I think has helped me become more wholistic in my views on technology.

After almost 5 years however, I feel it is time to seek new challenges.

So, on Januar 2nd 2012 I’ll join d60, which is a fast-growing Microsoft-based consultancy agency on the outskirts of central Aarhus. d60 is just about equally split between systems development and business intelligence, so hopefully I’ll gain some insight in BI, which I think will help me build better systems. At d60 I’ll continue working as a software development consulatant, and hopefully I’ll continue to communicate with smart people about software development and help building cool solutions to real world problems.