It's that time of the year again when we look back and reflect on what we accomplished during the previous year and set goals for the next year. Here are the highlights from my 2013.

2013 shaped up to be an amazing year. I started blogging again and was able to write about 18 blog posts which is pretty good for not blogging in years. I learned quite a bit of basic German using Memrise and Duolingo while running on the treadmill during my lunch break. I also went through a lot of interviews, some that turned out really well, others that didn’t turn out so great.

In the development realm, I learned about Sass and began to use it in production. I made Sassy Studio, my first Visual Studio extension that helped me out with all the work I was doing with Sass. At the time of writing, Sassy Studio has been downloaded over 4,300 times!

I also made murmurhash-net which helped me overcome some performance and storage problems we hit with SHA1. This also happens to be my first NuGet package, which was fun to do as well.

On the non-technical side, I read all of the Ender’s Game series and started the Ender’s Shadow series. I also started reviewing an upcoming technical book about Visual Studio 2013.

A new year and a new job

After 8 years, I’ll be leaving my post as lead developer at hh2 and moving on to DevResults. It’s kind of crazy to be moving into a different industry, but I’m really excited about the new tasks that await me and I’m looking forward to seeing what impact I can make in the international development and humanitarian communities.

I’m also excited about keeping focussed on Sassy Studio both on resolving issues and adding new features. Hopefully I’ll be able to refactor major portions of the SassyStudio code into a full-blown Sass compiler.

On the side of things I’m not looking forward to, but definitely am going to get accomplished, this year will be the year that I get my dog new hips to fix her hip displaysia which will hopefully let her live a pain free rest of her life.

Goodbye 2013, hello 2014

As with everything, I hope this year we can all live in the present but be mindful of all the things we learned in 2013. Happy new years everyone!