As the year wraps up, I thought I'd write up some thoughts about my 2014. This is pretty personal, so I don't actually expect a lot of people to read this, but if you do, thanks for listening. It was an interesting year overall, and I end it with health, a roof over my head, and people who love me, so no matter what else, I'm blessed.

The Blog

Let's talk about the blog first. As folks know, I finally bit the bullet and transitioned from my own ColdFusion blogware to a WordPress blog. It was rocky (and I realize now I still haven't talked about the process) but I feel pretty happy about the transition overall. WordPress is an amazingly powerful blog engine. I know I still have kinks to work out (right now I'm seeing it crash about once a week), but I think I made the right choice. In terms of content, my top entries for 2014 are:

  1. Barcode Scanner sample, and new repo for Cordova examples
  2. Browser as a platform for your PhoneGap/Cordova apps
  3. My perspective of working with the Ionic Framework
  4. Cordova File System – Important Update
  5. Examples of the Marvel API
  6. IndexedDB on iOS 8 – Broken Bad
  7. Cordova Sample: Check for a file and download if it isn’t there
  8. Apache Cordova 3.3 and Remote Debugging for Android
  9. Cordova Sample: Reading a text file
  10. Ionic and Cordova’s DeviceReady – My Solution

Missing from the list is my favorite blog entry - one that got no comments (outside of my own) - my demo of the New York Times API. I thought that was cool - but apparently no one else did (grin). But if there's one thing I've learned in ten plus years of blogging, the entries I expect to get comments don't and the ones I do not expect to get comments will get a huge number of them.

Overall I'm happy with the content I created this year. In terms of my writing outside of the blog, I also wrote the following articles for other publications:

Conferences, Presentations, Etc

It was a slow year for me in terms of conferences, and I still don't do a great job of recording when and where I speak in a way that is easy to search. Due to my job changes (see below) and the adoption late in the year, I had to refrain from submitting as much as I'd like. I even had to cancel two conferences in October because of my travel to China. (Which I don't regret of course. :) One of my resolutions this year was to make better use of Google Hangouts. I did create a few presentations on the platform and I'd like to do more next year. It isn't as good as being in person of course, but it is significantly easier. (To be clear, it still takes time to prepare and presenting itself is work!) In fact, if you, dear reader, are still here, and don't see me announce something in terms of an online presentation for January, remind me.

Career

Well... yeah. I've been pretty honest about how my role has changed at Adobe. For about a year and a half now I've not been an evangelist. In fact, the entire evangelism team at Adobe is pretty much down to a few people, just concerned with Creative Cloud. I'd love to talk to you (the generic you) about what Adobe does product-wise. I'd love to help people learn more about our efforts in terms of web standards and are web-related products. But yeah. Not going to happen. I guess I'm lucky. I spent some months doing basic HTML work for the Learn content. That work included things like copying and pasting CSS for someone who didn't know how to use source control. (Seriously.) Early in 2014 I transitioned to the Creative SDK team. I got training in ObjectiveC which was absolutely fascinating, but my role now is essentially that of a technical writer. Certainly I like to write, but I can't say that this is a role that I'm best suited for.

I love to teach. I'm not that smart - but I think I'm damn good at explaining things in a way that makes it easier for others to learn. If I want to be a developer evangelist than it will not be at Adobe. That's all I'll say about that. (For now.)

My Favorite Song

I played this about a bazillion times this year and it never gets old.

My Favorite Movie

Easy - the new Transformers movie.

(Sorry - just threw up a little.)

There were some really enjoyable films this year, but the best is - well - the two best - would be Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America 2. I want to give a slight edge to Captain America 2 for being probably one of the best sequels ever. But then I want to give a slight edge to GoG for being so damn cool even though I had known nothing at all about the characters. And it has a racoon with a gun. So yeah, I'll pick both. I keep thinking this winning streak Marvel has is going to end soon, but while it lasts, it is an awesome time to be a comic book fan.

Oh, speaking of comics - I think my favorite over the year was the Dark Horse Star Wars line. It ended - but was really good. I'm looking forward to the new series by Marvel next year.

My Favorite Video Game

While I played some fun games this year, there wasn't anything as epic as "Last of Us" or "Tomb Raider." I'm enjoying the hell out of "Dragon Age:Inquisition" now and I really respect how Diablo 3 is being updated to keep the game fun. I'm happy I picked up the Playstation 4 as the XBox One just didn't seem appealing to me. The only regret I have there is missing out on Forza. Forza has always seemed like a simpler, more enjoyable simulator compared to Gran Turismo.

Things I Failed At

I gained a bit of weight. I'm not too beat up over it but I'd like to lose about five pounds over the next month or so. Mainly I think I just eat too much. I love food but I just need to be a bit more careful about my portions. Exercise-wise I've done ok. According to RunKeeper I walked 486 miles, which is pretty good. (There was a bit of cycling in there too.) I would have easily hit 500 but October/November was a dead period for me because of China.

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I also failed at doing a bit of creative writing. I thought about it quite a bit, took some notes for a story I want to write, but didn't actually try. That disappoints me. I don't think I'll be successful at fiction writing but I'd like to fail at writing than fail at not writing.

I had other failures too, but nothing I regret, and that's a good thing.

2015

No resolutions this year - just some general guidelines as stated above. I will have some big news in about two weeks, but till then, be safe, be good, and happy New Year!

Photo Credit: Happy New Year by David Yu