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2013 - Year in Review

So for a while now I have thought about writing a "Year in Review" post annually. As I am working on actively blogging again this year is the perfect year to start.

Work

It has been another excellent year in my job at Holiday Extras. It has been challenging at times, but I would not enjoy my job so much if it was not challenging. I have an excellent team and it has been great to see them grow and develop over the past twelve months.

Hilight of the year for me would be getting the chance to speak at FOWA. I have wanted to try my hand a speaking for some time now and I really enjoyed the experience of getting on stage and talking about APIs. The feedback was excellent and I enjoyed networking and answering attendees questions after my talk. I have caught the speaking bug now. I'm looking forward to doing some more tech speaking in 2014.

As well as FOWA I had the chance to attend a few more conferences this year. Five conferences in total in 3 countries.

AWS Summit 2013 - April - London
The Great British Node Conference - September - London
Dublin Web Summit 2013 - October - Dublin
API Days 2013 - December - Paris

The last good work point of 2013 was that I managed to do a lot more networking. I got out the office more and got talking to some great people. I et Syd Lawrence at The Great British Node Conference and then again at the Twilio Night Summit event at Web Summit. I also got chatting to Eamon Leonard and Matt Gifford at the FOWA speakers dinner. I went on to see Eamon again at Web Summit where he organised a great line up of speakers on the Developers Stage.

I discovered a great local web meetup codeHarbour. Which again got me crossing paths with some interesting people.

All in all an excellent work year!

Myself

I started the year with a detox in support of my wife doing her detox diet. This was good and I lost 1/2 a stone. Unfortunately it did not last. I now own a spin bike at home, but have not made enough use of it. So next year I must eat better and exercise a lot more. Maybe I will start cycling to work again.

I must also get my blog in order and make an effort to blog more!

Discoveries

To end my year in review I thought it would be great to list some of the things I have discovered over the course of the year.

Music - Best cover of the year for me was Daughter - "Get Lucky".
Top Purchase - My best purchase this year was my HTC One Phone.
Coding - Discovered static site builders using Grunt. More on this in a future blog post.

Conclusion

2013 was a pretty good year. Lets see if we can make 2014 even better.