Proud fact: this month, I start my 9th year of blogging. That means I’ve been at it for 8 years. My first post was on Blogger and was about UML. Since then, my writing has definitely improved and become more focused, mainly on .NET and more recently javascript.

I enjoy writing, but can’t always find the time or energy for it. So I’m not what you call a regular blogger. Which is the hardest part of blogging. Many people start a blog, and I encourage you to do so too. However, the hard part is keeping at it. So I’m proud that I’ve almost reached a decade of blogging and 321 posts. Hopefully I’ve helped out some people here and there.

2015

So what did 2015 bring for me?

I didn’t achieve any of my goals I mentioned in my post on 2014. I didn’t even take the time for most of them, and others were no longer necessary. So I’m going to be careful with stating goals for 2016.

But some things were achieved, luckily.

I am now an independent contractor, which means you can hire me. My company’s name is Red Star IT and I plan to write up something about that separately later. The website was made with Metalsmith, Handlebars and Skeleton CSS and you can find the source on GitHub.

I moved from the old Blogger platform to hosting a Ghost blog on Azure. That was definitely a good thing to do, and long overdue.

I also became a father. I’m not one to write too much about my private life on the internet, so I won’t be expanding on this very much or often. But it has changed my life of course. For the better. I’ve been enjoying it so far (she’s a good sleeper :).

A kid does take a chunk of time out of the spare free time you have, so personal projects have been a bit limited this year. But there is one in the pipeline I’ll be writing about later. I’m using Aurelia for it, and love it. I prefer it over Angular right now.

2016

As I mentioned, I’ll be cautious when stating goals and projects for 2016. Because I always tend to put less time in than I had hoped to, and also just drop some projects because something else comes along (remember, actually finishing something is the hard part).

But I do want to:

• take my exam on Zythology AKA the study of beer
• finish my Aurelia project (because I can very much use it myself, now that I’m independent)
• play around with home automation, my Raspberry Pi and my Arduino
• learn something new (F#? Angular 2?, maybe just the Arduino, combining two goals into one)
• add comments to this blog

Chris Love has some great advice on how to achieve goals, so I probably should work on that a little more too. Because a lot of the points he mentions are things I haven’t really done in the past, I haven’t always achieved the things I wanted to. Following his tips should help out. I definitely recommend reading his post.

So that’s it for me. I wish everyone a happy 2016 and hope your wishes/dreams/projects/plans materialize.