2018 in Review

I've always meant to do year reviews, but most of the time, I felt so unhappy with what I've achieved in the year, that I've almost never had the energy to take it out the drafts folder in whatever blogging tool I'm using that year. Doing this is scary, but I'm hoping the public aspect of it will help me be honest with myself when setting goals in 2019.

Goals I set for 2018, at the end of 2017.

Rejig my flat so work life is separated from the rest of my life.

I did this. I've converted former bedroom into a home office, and fit a mezzanine floor in the lounge, so it provides a sleeping area in the main leisure place.

It's much easier to host friends when they visit now, and my flat feels more like my home, rather than a place where I couldn't make a relationship work with the person I moved into it with.

I'm really happy about this, and whenever I travel, I am excited about coming home, seeing how the plants have grown and generally having a place of calm and recovery.

Hit 68kg weight again

Yup, did this too, in the first 3 months, mainly through cutting back on food, running more and doing freeletics. Felt good.

Then I totally fell off the wagon, and put it back on later, during my first long holiday outside of Europe (see below - Bali)

Did the Berlin Half marathon in less than two hours

I nailed this too - whoop whoop!

I wasn't sure I could make this time, but I think I can beat it in 2019, as long as I remember to focus on distance work - I focussed on faster, shorter runs this year, and I think I want to get better at longer distance in 2019.

Do 80k of billable work

Meh. I didn't make this goal.

I was able to keep the wolves at bay, but I spent way more time on interesting, but speculative stuff, and figuring out where I want to carve out a fulfilling niche professionally, instead of spending time doing more quotidien billable work.

This the thing about being self employed. You can pick what to work on, but it also requires a degree of discipline to make sure you have a full pipeline of work, and I didn't manage this for parts of 2018. On the bright side, it looks like I'm basically booked til October 2019 already…

Find a way to work on environmental web work full time

I have a really nerdy dream I want to work towards, of the entire web running entirely on renewable power.

I think I might have had some success finding a way to work on this, but I don't want to jinx it until I can speak publicly about it in 2019. I'll update this one when I know for sure if it landed or not.

Be a recognised authority in Wardley Mapping

I helped organise the second MapCamp, a 400 person conference after speaking there the time year before, but I failed to finish some working on Cartograph, a related project before the year was out.

I think the energy I would have spent on this I ended up immersing myself in ResearchOps related stuff, which I'll touch on later.

Sort out Irish Citizenship

This is an awkward one for me to talk about, as I'm reliant on other family members feeling like Brexit is a sufficiently urgent and important issue, to get past some awkward conversations.

I can't really say more than that, but I remain hopeful.

Other highlights

Going to Bali

As I mentioned before, I went on my first holiday in yonks, and my first long haul flight in years. I read loads of books, and learned to surf, and saw members of my family I hadn't seen since 2009. It was masses of fun, and I'll treasure the memories from it.

I was conflicted about the huge carbon footprint of the flight, and finding an way to offset that I felt was meaningful turned out to be pretty pricey (120 EUR from a ~750 EUR ticket). It was however a trigger to learn loads about our options are for potential for carbon neutral aviation in the future.

Workshops and events

I mentioned spending a time chasing interesting, speculative work instead of doing billable work. It largely came in the form of running workshops and unconferences as a way to explore areas I wanted to learn more about, and find people help me understand new domains.

OMGDPR

I organised OMGDPR - my first unconference. Unsurprisingly, it was about GDPR, and building digital products with respected people's privacy better. I worked with Tiffany and Maik, and had a real blast doing so. It also got me a to JSConf EU, possibly the biggest, glitziest conference I've ever been to, and going there made me certain I want to find a way to speak there in future.

ResearchOps

After getting to know Kate, and then meeting her in London, I got quite involved in growing the ResearchOps community, and running a workshop in Berlin about the subject.

I've found it a fantastic way to learn about building and managing communities, and it's really helped me develop an understanding of how organisations learn, and how sense-making is distributed through them. I've also made friends, and it's been a fantastic example of an international collaboration where I've been able to work with people literally tens of thousands of kilometres from me, on fuzzy, hard to nail down stuff.

It's also been a nice complement to the work I've been doing on Wardley Mapping.

Beyond Wedges and Bits und Bäume

When thinking through the renewable powered web thing, I've ended up thinking a lot about what a society that avoided catastrophic climate change would look like, and how people communicate using games and so on. I came across the Princeton Wedges, as tool for climate communication, and I worked a friend, Alper to run a workshop about it at a Sustainability and Tech conference held art Frei University in November. I've learned a lot from running game now, and it's really helped me think about how to talk about the extend of changes needed if we want to stay inside safe limits of global warming.

Designing out Waste

Also this year, I wanted to develop a more rigorous way of thinking about sustainability when I'm talking to others in the tech industry, and especially when we look beyond working with digital products. I was lucky enough to make friends with Isabel, someone who has thought about it much longer and much harder than I have, and we ended up running a workshop at Thingscon in Rotterdamn too.

Other professional work

I did some other work I'm proud of too.

Contributing code to Firefox

I got my first code accepted into the Firefox browser. It's a trivial patch, but it's still my code in a product hundreds of millions of people use, which feels great, and did wonders for my own self doubt about my own coding skills after last year.

Working on Climate Change and Open Data

I've also been working on a project with Spendnetwork where we take public spending data, and use it to identify when and where key spending decisions in public sector that will lock in large amounts of carbon emissions.

The goal is to help organisations understand how to reach the targets being passed by their own governing bodies, but also provide more transparency in this field too. It feels like I'm fighting for the good guys when I work on it, and I'm really enjoying it. We're actively looking for Django developers interested in working with us, so if this sounds like it might be up your street please get in touch.

What do I want next year?

That's a separate post, but in short, want to go deeper, on fewer things next year. Historically, given my attention span, this will be a challenge, but it seems worth trying.