It has been a bit quiet that last couple of months, because I was busy finishing up with the danish patent and trademark office, where we finally went live with a new case management system. It has been a very long process for the organisation, so it was a big milestone to get the new system along with all the smaller services for working with patents live.

Now I have moved on to my next adventure, where I will work as a tech lead for Trifork eHealth. So it is a new domain for me, but I look forward to learning more about the health industry. More...

Another year has flown by, and it has been quite a change of pace for me. With my daughter being born last year, I have had to prioritise more than ever. Not really a surprise, but when you are going into it you don’t really know what will be possible. Looking back it has definitely changed my every day life for the better, although I have had to cut down on some spare time activities.

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What a year this has been, and now is the time for my yearly review. Work wise my business has been very simple to run and very stable, because I have continued to extend my contract with DI. This may sound boring initially, but the reason this has worked for me is that I get to dive into a lot of technologies especilly around Azure and Visual Studio Team Services. I have been building a greenfield self-service application, for one of the biggest and most influential organisations in the country, while having the hands on the wheel with reguard to tech and design. So although I have not been moving on to new projects as much as I expected I am loving it.

So it's that time again. Another year has past, and like so many others I want to take a little time to look back at how I have spent my nerdy hours. Most importantly it has been my second years as an independent consultant, and I am still enjoying the freedom and the chance to work on projects that are very different. More...

Fair warning, this is not a tech post, but me doing some happy contenplating. Hopefully someone might get something from this, but if you are looking for my usual techy posts, this one is not one of them. So with that in place..

If there is one thing I have been thick headed about in my life, it is how much my "problems" are created entirely by myself. It took me almost 34 years to truly acknowledge this, but when I did it hit me like a ton of bricks - really nice, fluffy happy bricks. More...

What a crazy year this has been! A year ago my girlfriend and I had just started construction of our new house, so we were living temporarily in a ruin from 1892 and I was working at d60 in Vanløse. Now we are all settled in our house, Elisabeth is now my wife, she is starting her phd, and I have been working as an independent consultant for 11 months!

So it has been a very busy year for os, and I do hope 2015 will be a little less action packed, with time to enjoy our new lives and do some travelling. A trip to Barcelona is already in the cards, so it is looking promising.

Becomming independent

Starting as an independent consultant was something I had been considering for a while. When we moved I chose to go for the job at d60, because it was a good chance to build a new team. Long story short, that didn't go as I had hoped, so when opportunities presented themselves that would make starting on my own fairly smooth I had to seize the moment, and I am really glad I did. I have really enjoyed the freedom, the chance to work on very different projects and the improved possibilities to speak at conferences.

During these 11 months a have amongst other things built a workschedule module and a budgetting module, I redesigned a big webapplication, wrote an fairly large API, worked on components for QlikView, wrote a tool for calculating distance matrices for a logistics company and started work as a consultant on a large ecommerce project. So it has been really exciting and a lot of fun. When it comes to speaking I have been at the Warm Crocodile Conference, DDC, NDC, CNUG, Visma, Ida, Keyboard Warriors and Campusdays where I have been talking about Firebase, Angular, Azure and Single Page Application patterns. I tend to agree that the one thing that is more fun than programming is speaking about programming, so I have enjoyed all my talks and I hope to have time for pleanty of more talks next year.

True to form it is time to look back on another year that has passed way too quickly. Most of all it has been a year of change, where we  uprooted and moved across the country to Høje Taastrup, my girlfriend became my wife to be, we both started new jobs, and we began building our new house. So it has been action packed, a lot of fun, but also with a few bumps on the road.

After 4½ years at Vertica and 6½ years doing e-commerce I recently made the decision to look for new challanges. I am really happy with the years I have spent both with Hedal:Kruse:Brohus and Vertica doing e-commerce where I have learned a lot and had some great colleagues, but I really felt like making a change. Timing wise it made sense to do it now, because my girlfriend and I were looking to move to the other end of the country, where she got a job.

Looking around d60 caught my eye as a very interesting company, where things are evolving quickly and where I know they have a skilled group of developers - some of whom I already knew from the developer community. I sent them and email, and after a meeting there was no doubt that it was a good match, as a place where I can learn new skills as well as contribute new ideas.

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Last year I did my first debriefing. I felt it was a good chance to take a quick look back and it felt good to reflect a bit and do a brain dump. So now I am at it again after a year that has flown by, in spite of some hard moments.

Personally this year had a tough start for my family, because the family business went bankrupt. I grew up in a house next to my parent’s greenhouse, so it was a central part of life in my upbringing. Acknowledging that it was the end of the road, and my dad had to move out of the house was frustrating. That said I am thankful that my siblings who both worked there have found new jobs, and my dad has adapted well to life as a pensioner.

Later on things have only gone forward. In the summer my girlfriend finished her masters, and just a few days ago she had her first scientific article accepted for publishing. I am really happy for her, and it makes for interesting prospects in the new year, where she will look to get a job and possibly start a PhD.

For me as a developer it has been a very exciting year, that offered plenty of opportunities. More...

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 :)