Chapter 5: And Now For Something a Little Different
For those of y'all just joining in on the fun, I've been writing a look-at-all-the-stuff-that's-going-on post every New Year for the past four years.
I had a proper recap of 2014, which links to all the other posts I've done since 1 January 2012.
It's hard to believe I've been in this industry for four years now. The journey has been absolutely incredible: from starting at absolute zero in 2012 to helping to launch major projects and leading teams in 2015, it's humbling to see how quickly I've gotten to this point.
On a technical level, I have to say that my biggest accomplishment of 2015 was giving a keynote in another language (Spanish) at JSConf Colombia in Medellín. I couldn't have done it without the incredible support of the community, and for that I'm immensely grateful.
I made a conscious decision to only do four conference talks this year (as compared to the eight or nine I did in 2013 and 2014)... In addition to JSConf Colombia, I had the incredible opportunity to emcee Node Summit, open Codemania in New Zealand, and present at StrangeLoop in St. Louis. To make up for my lack of a billion and five talks, I also did a bunch of podcasts (even becoming a co-host of one!), panels, and interviews.
2016, however, will be a year of further simplification. I will again only do four conference talks (of which one has already been booked), and none of them will be robotics-related.
Don't get me wrong: robots are awesome. I have spent the last three years presenting, organizing events around, and encouraging people to play with robots. But it's time to pass the torch.
The NodeBots community has grown in ways I could have never expected, and I'm so proud of the people who have made it the international phenomenon that it has become. Y'all don't need me anymore; the fire is burning in each and everyone one of you. I am inspired by you, and the NodeBots community will continue to grow. Thank you for having fun with me :-D
On a personal level, I've spent a lot of my free time crafting this year. I started with a End-of-Year Project (instead of a resolution), in which my goal was to make a pair of jeans from scratch. Sadly, I don't have a completed pair of jeans, but! I do have a pillow, a t-shirt, a hoodie, a pair of pajama pants, and multiple drafts of skirts and jeans!
More importantly, though: I also have a better foundation in life outside of tech, which had escaped me since starting on this journey in 2012. It's easy for us to write code at work and then go home and write more code and then spend all of our time talking to our friends about code. There's certainly nothing wrong with this way of life, but when it's all a person does, it's easy to think that there is no life outside of code (except there is! there IS life outside of your computer!). And 2015 was the year that I really started to learn that. (See also: exercise.)
I'm sure there was other stuff that happened in 2015, and I'm sure I tweeted about it. But other than that: 2016 will, without a doubt, be an even bigger challenge than 2015 was.
Given my track record, I'm not even going to pretend I know what 2016 is going to look like, but I'm hoping it'll have more vacations in it. Yeah, definitely more vacation.
Thanks all ❤️
