State of the union; 2012
So, here we are then - actually its been almost two weeks now; 2012. As most bloggers tend to do, I’m going to do the same; do a state of the union thing to tell the world “wasssssup”. Consider it a delayed Christmas letter from a relative. :)
2011 was probably one of the most stressful years I’ve had ever, it is the first year I am totally on my own as a freelancer and not having an employer, but have clients instead. That is needless to say quite different, not in the terms of what kind of work I do, but in more in a psychological perspective. In addition to that I had quite a few speaking engagements. Late 2010 I signed a deal with Programutvikling to do courses in 2011, I did a couple for them as well, but decided to drop doing courses as I was spreading myself way too thin doing way too much stuff. During 2011 I’ve also been heavily involved in the open source community, for the most part on the following projects; Balder and Bifrost, with most focus on the latter. I also started another project called Forseti, a JavaScript test/spec headless runner written in C# and has the goal of being a self contained executable that is easy to use and get up and running. October last year I got renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 4th time, very honored and grateful to be receiving this award.
Come 2012, still alive and kicking, new opportunities and challenges are coming. For the last two and a half years I’ve been hired by Komplett to be their solutions architect and help build there vNext platform for e-commerce for both mobile and desktop web-browsers. The project has been an awesome experience and helped shape Bifrost. But, a new opportunity arose, and from 1st of March this year, I will be involved in a software project at Statoil, Norwegian oil-company. Really looking forward to be involved in that particular project. I will however continue to press forward on building features and fixing bugs in all of the open source projects I’m involved in. Will also try to involve myself more in the developer communities, such as NNUG and other communities. Allthough software is what I do, I’m also slowly realizing that I need to focus more of my energy on my own health. Personal exercise has never been a very big focus on my part, sure I’ve done my share of bi-cycling - but never reached a point were its natural or I end up doing it on a regular basis. Therefor, this year I’m setting out on a big hairy goal; be part of something called Birkebeinerrittet, apparently the worlds largest cross country bicycle race. In order to accomplish this I need all the motivation in the world and something driving me towards that goal. I decided in December 2011 to start a website to help me drive myself towards that goal; GeekRider. Not entirely sure what the site will end up being, but my plan is to let the site drive forward a few ideas I have with regards to how I see web development moving forward and at the same time help me maintain all of the mentioned open source projects - a synergy.
I guess thats just about it, wish me luck.. :)