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.
Community
Outside the work it has again been a very very good year. I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP and I have continued to do talks about TypeScript and DocumentDB, but it has also very much been the year of ASP.NET Core 1.0. This lead to two talks in CNUG and one in ANUG, that were well visited and with people who are excited about the new platform, while remaining concious about when to get on board. It is always difficult, but also very interesting to talk to people about when to take on a new platform, and the worries they have. As always I have also been blogging, and ended on 11 blog posts this year, so I am quite happy with that.
Women in IT
A different challenge I got this year, was to go to Venice and do the same talk 4 times in a day for 200 women, who are considering a carreer in STEM (Science, Technology and Math). It was really hard to fly out, sleep, do the talks and then straight home again, but it was a fantastic experience, that opened my eyes to some of the issues that exist.
Personally I am very sceptical about forcing equality and persuing equality by numbers, because when you give a group of people a priveledge, you are robbing others of their fair chance - and I don't think there is a difference no matter what minority or group of people this applies to. The important thing, I think, is equal opportunity. I don't think having the same number of penisses and vaginas in any one room, education or workplace is important or preferable, but when none of either are present you can’t help but think something is off. People should be allowed to make free choices and be treated the same no matter the choice they make or the carreer they persue and what I learned and found very interesting at the Make Whats Next conference, was that the girls at the conference, who were from countries in south and eastern europe, were talked out of pursuing carreers in science, even by their own parents.
A journalist told me, that in this reguard they look to Denmark and Sweden, because they think we are years ahead of them. Parents directly talking their own daughters out of persuing certain carreers surprised me, simply because as the journalist said, we don't do that where I come from. So being able to talk to all these young women, and hopefully inspire some of them to persue a carreer in software development was a great pleasure, and something I can only hope to do again.
Clara
The biggest news, and life changeing event of the year has been on the home front, where my wife and I had our first child. Our beautiful little girl Clara, who is at this time just over two weeks old. Becomming a parent is every bit as huge and life changing as people have told me over and over. I am usually a confident guy, but when you have a child it makes you fragile and question yourself, at least more than I ever have. Every day seems more significant all of a sudden. Although we sleep less, I in many ways feel more present than I have for a while and I definately feel more happy. So I look very much forward to seeing our little family continue to develop in 2017.
Not 20 years old any more
For most of the year I have had one constant battle, which is that sitting as much as I do is starting to take its toll on my body. Even though I had been working out for almost 20 years, it just did not compensate for 7,5 hours of work every day and numerous evenings on the couch and or at diningtables. This meant that I continued to have back pains and my neck and shoulders became more and more stiff, leading to headackes and discomfort. The need to change this, and the fact that I want to be able to play with my daughter for many years in the future made me read and try out a number of different things. What I have learned is that most types of fitness training tend to focus mostly on either strength or flexibility, eg. weight training/crossfit and yoga. When you focus too much on specific exercises, and on either strength or flexibility, it is pretty much guranteed to lead to imbalances and injury. So I started looking for a way to work out that would balance strength, coordination and mobility while training functional movement. I wanted something I could also do at home, because I won't always have time to go to the gym as much as I would like. For now my search has ended after I started doing TacFit, which has exactly this focus, and is build on the promise of reducing the risk of injury. It has been quite a change, because it is mostly done in a group setting and after a little over a month I feel way better. So I hope I will continue to improve, and that I will continue to have fun with this in 2017.
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