2014

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I've been looking forward to writing this retrospective on 2014. What a year! I couldn't of predicted what an eventful year it has been. It's had a lot of ups and downs but it's all learning and growing at the end of it.

It's easy to regret some things I could of done better or done at all, but that's not the outlook on life I choose to have. We've barely sat down this year, so it's better to celebrate the things we have done rather than the things we haven't.

Moving to Switzerland

This time last year moving to Zürich, Switzerland was on the cards. By the end of March we were out of our flat in Brighton and homeless in Zürich. We had sold most of our furniture and I threw away a lot of crap I owned that had built up since I moved out of my parents and started university.

It felt great to finally get rid of stuff that just seemed to follow me around and I never used. It changed my mindset a little on what is valuable and I want to keep working on only owning things that are bringing me value.

We were lucky to find a furnished flat early on. After nine months of living in Höngg I'm eager to try somewhere a little more active and closer to the city.

This year has been a busy year with a lot of distractions and barriers, but I don't feel like I've leapt into the swiss culture and made progress learning the language. At least not as much as I could of.

I'm curious to see how I will feel about Switzerland a year from now. I've never moved to a country before, so now that I've done it once and experienced it I can plan a little better on how to do it well. If I ever moved to a new country again I would plan well in advance so I could hit the ground running and make space in the year to learn and breathe. Bring on 2015 now.

Traveling

Too much! Too much travel. According to Tripit I took around 35 trips this year. Traveling to the UK on a occasionally is important, it helps us to work together well in a distributed team. The tough times were when business trip were close to conference trips. Instead of a few days away form Zürich it could easily become a whole week. Some months I felt like I was barely at home!

A lot of that is down to lack of forward planning. In 2015 I'm going to try and plan more and further to reduce strain.

Having said that, I can't complain too much. I got a taste of many new countries, cultures, and cities.

I've always thought that it's great for a career to drag you around the world. I'm lucky to have the opportunity and support to do it so I should embrace. I do feel like I didn't spend enough time exploring the places I went to. It's a shame to go somewhere, spend all time indoors, and then leave.

In 2015, I want to spend more time exploring, so I'm aiming is to go to less places but spend more time exploring when I do travel. Columbia in February is going to be our first long holiday. Los Angeles and in May will be our second.

Working

What a great year it's been! I've been working on one project for almost the entire year, and I'm happy to say that it launched this month! Although I've worked on projects with more reach and more users, this feels like the biggest project I've worked on, because of the impact I feel like I've had on the Judicial Appointment Commission and the difference that makes to the world.

WunderRoot continues to grow in interesting ways. I love being able to work at a company where I can influence how it develops and the kind of company it grows into. As the clients and the UK team increase and diversify I think we're going to find it harder and harder to maintain our culture and keep everyone happy.

Writing

I think I wrote a lot this year, but not on this site. A lot of writing has the intention of pushing forward various community initiatives and they needed as wide a distribution as possible. I lot of the blog posts were either published on the Wunderkraut/WunderRoot site. I think I will go back and republish everything I've written on this site, to prevent them being lost if any sites disappear in the future.

Speaking

In my 2013 retrospective I wrote that, after a crazy year of speaking, I decided that I would speak no more than five times. This year I spoke four times, two of which were new talks. Sprinting at Drupal events continues to become more and more important so I prefer to have my focus there instead of worrying about my slides and getting enough practice in. In 2015 I've already spoken twice... so let's see how that goes.

Ok so it took a little while longer to write this post than I thought, maybe that says a lot about how busy this year was.