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 :)

This December I spent a couple of days at the HTML5 fast-track course, getting up to speed on various new and coming browser features and API’s. The course was hosted by Trifork who had invited Peter Lubbers – who wrote the book Pro HTML5 Programming to go over the umbrella that is the HTML5 specification. He and his co-host Mathias Bynens did a great job at presenting the most important aspects of the spec. They also managed to communicate the more blurry parts in a way, so we left with a good overview of the maturity of the different browser implementations. So today I will write a bit about some of the things we went over, and hopefully help you learn a bit more about HTML5, while providing you with a bunch of links where you can learn more.

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After my last post on the faceted search I was asked to elaborate on how it was implemented with MongoDB. So that is just what I will do with this post – giving me the chance to comment a bit on the good and the bad experiences. Even though it was a good overall experience, there will always be things to wish for – the day I say otherwise is the day I should stop being a developer.

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