So, the time has come to look back on the year that has passed, and reflect a bit. I am usually more focused on making plans than writing history books, but once in a while it can be beneficial to take a look at what you have been doing, so you can make better conscious choices in the future. I do tend to get lost in all my little projects, so sometimes it is a nice reminder to look back and get some ideas of why the year went by so fast.

So what were the more interesting parts of my year? Well, I

• Built MiniMe, which has had > 370 downloads since july and a couple of contributors.
• Blogged here and on blog.vertica.dk – writing 18 blog posts total. Getting a pat on the shoulder as blogger of the year at Vertica, along with another good colleague.
• Hosted an ANUG code camp on IronRuby.
• Did a ANUG podcast about the NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook.
• Played around with a bunch of technologies, and found use for some of them at work – doing faceted search with MongoDB and KnockoutJS as one of the more exciting solutions.
• Did hobby projects to fool around with WebMatrix, MVC3 and Entity Framework.
• Read a handfull of books on webdevelopment rangeing from Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial to Dependency Injection in .NET.
• Attended HTML5 fasttrack, Commerce Server Training and a bunch of ANUG and Trifork events and code camps.
• Was SEEE certified – mostly getting to know why not to use it.
• Helped win the e-commerce award for start-ups in Denmark – which I actually worked on last year.
• My first Windows Phone 7 app Blue Orb Player just turned one year and has been installed from marketplace > 285 times.

At work it has been a pretty versatile year, where I have had some consultant tasks, worked with Windows CE and Silverlight as well as the more regular ASP.NET projects - where BD, Bolia and Trollbeads have taken up the most of my time. I can only hope that 2012 will be just as exciting and with HTML5, devices and more client driven solutions shaping up to become important themes, I will probably have as much fun as I did this year.

Merry xmas and happy new year everyone :)

A piece of advise that is often given to developers who want to keep improving, is to learn a new programming language every year. I mostly think it holds true if you try to learn a new paradigme – because just learning new syntax won’t really get you anywhere.

Koans

One way of learning a new language is of course to buy a book or two, and start reading and doing some samples and small applications. Another way of going about it is to try some of the koans, interactive interpreters and introductory guides that can be found online.

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