I remember when I used to feel a little shame in missing a post for one month. Then a few months. Now? We’re looking at nearly a year — and it’s been kind of a crazy year. It’s not over yet, but I find myself in a reflective mood tonight, so, hey.
In 2009, I spent some time playing with some HTML5 APIs, as evidenced by the drum kit and my little canvas demos and such. I’d spent more and more of my free time researching and studying JavaScript more and more. A lot of my little canvas demos had pushed me into looking into optimizations and ways to stop memory leaks.
I still wouldn’t call myself an optimization master, but I’d definitely picked up a number of best practices along the way, which led me to giving a couple of small talks:
- Tuesday, March 2, 2010: HTML5 in 5 at IgniteNM 5
- Wednesday, April 7, 2010: Rasters, Vectors, and Scripting, Oh My at Webuquerque (I seriously regret that goofy title)
Both talks were volunteer affairs – I wasn’t explicitly asked to talk, I just like to talk about things that excite me. However, the Webuquerque talk led me in an interesting direction.
Long story short, I took a chance, put myself out there, and earned a spot on the SitePen team. I’ve always been fortunate to work for good companies, but I have to say, working for SitePen has been an absolute dream come true. I get to work in JavaScript in some capacity every single day. I’ve gotten to build some really awesome things, to learn leaps and bounds in an immensely short period, and I work with some of the most amazing minds in JS today. It couldn’t be better, and I look forward to being a SitePenner for years to come.
Incidentally, if you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be working in JS every day and loving it, I’d have laughed at you, hard.
This year hasn’t been perfect, by any means. However, it’s definitely been a life-changing one. I really feel like I’m no longer just working a job, but really developing a career. I’ve had some amazing highs and amazing lows in 2010, and even though there’s still a month left to it, I know this year is going to go down in my books as one of the most amazing on record.
So, there’s that. I could say (again) that I’m going to try to post more (again), and I really do hope that’s the case. This blog’s definitely been more personal than technical in the past, but I suspect it’ll move more towards tech stuff at this point, with a rather heavy JS slant.
It’s not that I’m against personal sharing, and I’ll definitely be doing so, but it’s a different world and I’m a different person, and frankly, I suspect it’d be kinda boring if I told you all that I ate lunch at Dion’s again.
Oh, also, I’m down ~30 pounds this year too, which is nice, though I’m definitely kind of hitting up against a wall — but I can’t complain. I mean, 30 pounds is awesome.