2009 was quite an eventful year for me so, I guess, it is worth taking a look back. Finally got my diploma degree, found a new job, a new apartment, at least some travelling … Sadly, I haven't written about most of that stuff here on my blog but thanks to TweetScan I could also play a little data-mining on my tweets.
January
The year started with a shocker: The 1UP I grew to love over the last couple of years thanks to great podcasts like 1UP Yours experienced quite an exodus with most of the crew getting laid off. In other gaming news I played a bit of Prince of Persia for PS3 ;-)
Technology-wise I started playing around with CouchDB which I also ended up using as backend for our TwitterWall at February's Barcamp Klagenfurt.
February
In February Klagenfurt once again had its own Barcamp, work started on a sexy new site for Mercurial and Apple released the first public beta for Safari 4. Not bad for only 28 days.
March
For me perhaps the biggest change in March was that - all of a sudden - I had to pay for last.fm while users from the USA, UK or Germany could still enjoy the whole service for free.
April
I finally finished my master thesis and received my diploma degree in computer science from the University of Klagenfurt. It's been really nice there but now it is finally time to do something else :-) A big "Thank you" to everyone who helped me during that period.
May
Finally a Django conference on European soil and even somewhere where beer is cheaper than mineral water ;-) Since this was the only conference I attended in 2009 it might sound stupid to say it was the best of 2009 … but it was and really great at that. In Prague I also watched the latest Star Trek movie, which for me personally is probably the best ever. Even better than First Contact.
June
June was my very own summer (and in the end really black) hole. No relevant tech news, not all that much new to play (apart form inFamous which I finished during the first week) …
July
I started at my new job at Netconomy in Graz … and that basically sums up that month. Tons of work, little time for anything else especially since the apartment was still to furnish (and still partially is) :-) Just one thing: YouTube announced that they would stop supporting IE6 (aka scourge of modern web development).
August
Can't remember anything specific about this month but Flickr came to the rescue and told me that there was a night photowalk in Klagenfurt :-) Ah, and FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook and I immediately stopped using it. To this date I actually don't really know why. I guess it was just coincidence that I suffered from Web 2.0 fatigue right at the same time; although, it is not like anything happened afterwards on FriendFeed :-( At the same time the IE6 No More campaign was launched and it was quite a blast to see so many popular websites participating.
Apple also released Snow Leopard to the masses and with 30EUR at a really nice price-point. Naturally, I had to get it on day-one ;-)
September
After living with half-broken headphones for about a year by now (I mostly killed them in October 2008 on my way to the Barcamp in Munich at that time) I finally got the best headphones I've had so far: A pair of AKG K450. Expensive but worth every cent :-) I also discovered MongoDB as an alternative to CouchDB which I used immediately on this site.
October
Not all that much happened in October … except for a really wonderful photowalk in Vienna with tons of great people and perfect weather for exploring the Museumsquartier. Another part of Podcast history died, too: The final episode of Listen UP (formerly 1UP Yours) was aired … on the web … whatever you call that.
November
One year older, hurray … That and we went climbing ;-)
December
Amazon finally managed to bring their MP3 store to Austria; something I've been waiting for ages. Personally, I mostly switched to WebKit based browsers at home, simply because Firefox is still too slow on OSX. The last days of the year I spent in London, together with my new Nikon D90 … and enjoyed every minute of it, despite two out of 3 days being rainy and foggy. Btw.: Those Google Chrome ads in London really work - but only thanks to it also now finally being available for OSX.
Goals for 2010
- More London. I really enjoyed my little trip there and I'm still sad, that I couldn't stay longer.
- More traveling in general.
- Working a lot with Scala. It looks like just the right mix of Java and functional programming for me to really enjoy it
- More Python and Django again.
- ... and getting a life might also be nice for a change ;-)
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