08 – A Year in Review

It’s about that time of year again, when our culture collectively reflects on the past year. Or gets raging drunk, but I’m not doing that this New Years Eve.

So, what happened?

• Got an internship at a “real” company, instead of applying for research positions like I had done the years previous. I started applying in earnest during winter break, getting my first phone interview ever in 2011 (this is surprising to me, from where I stand now). It turns out that I had to keep fishing for jobs until the beginning of summer break before I landed a job down in the valley, about which I should have a retrospective soon.
• We started kicking up the action at ADI, putting on the first Devfest and putting ourselves on the map as the tech kids on campus. Not much more to say about that, me thinks.
• I started Notesoble, and I’m still not done with even a draft or any sort of demo. I could litter this post with things I might have done during 2011, but this is somewhat near and dear to my heart, so I’ll leave off the failures now.
• New laptop!
• Attended concerts in nice concert halls!
• Participated in less than all the hackathons, like HackNY and SVI Hackspace and SuperHappyDevHouse and Mozilla’s World Series of Hack!
• Almost built a functioning reprap! (there are still some electronics problems)
• Makerfaire!
• Fearing for my life academically! (I’ll post about this soon in my semester retrospective)

So that’s a year in a life, or at least the highlights reel. Could it have been better? Of course: until we have FAI, then there’s room to go upwards. But the year worked out to a net positive, and for that I am thankful.

My resolutions will come tomorrow.