A productive year, 2014

2014 was a good, productive year. Many, many things happened and many, many things shipped. I’ll take it.

Washington State University

As 2014 started, things were in full swing at WSU. We launched our first sites on the WSUWP Platform in the middle of February and have continued marching ever since. We’re now at 39 networks with 429 sites and 704 users. In the process, we’re sharing 117 repositories of our work on GitHub. Crazy!

My primary focus remains the central publishing platform, WSUWP, and the server provisioning that maintains that and other server instances. I continue to look for ways to help guide anyone toward sharing their work.

I think my favorite thing to come out of it all has been the open lab sessions we started holding in May. Every Friday morning a group of around 10-15 arrives and talks about the web for a couple hours. I’m hoping to promote this more throughout the university in 2015 so that we need to find a larger space.

Noteables: College of Business, Medicine, Hydrogen Lab, College of Engineering and Architecture, SWWRC, WSU Projects, WSU Labs, WSU Hub.

Varying Vagrant Vagrants

It was also a great year for VVV. Just about a year ago, we transitioned to an organization on GitHub. A few months later, we started the process of choosing an open source license. On October 7th, it was so.

Due to the productive year in other areas, and the temperance from changing a codebase that was in a licensing decision, it was a very slow release year. We did do quite a bit though and both our 1.1 and 1.2.0 releases were great. I’m excited about the things to come in 2015.

WordPress

I love WordPress. And it’s been a wonderful WordPress year.

3.9, 4.0, and 4.1 were such great releases and so many things are coming together for even greater releases next year. I was humbled and happy to be a guest committer for the 4.1 release cycle. While I didn’t accomplish everything I wanted to, I was happy that we kept marching. The working group that has started to form around multisite will lead toward great things soon I think.

I was really happy with my talk at WordCamp Seattle, and had a great time before during and after. Most fun was finding my coworkers off in their own groups during contributor day contributing away.

WordCamp Vancouver was excellent as always. The community we have in Cascadia is so much fun. I will now take an extra day every time I go up so that I can (a) get a beer tour with Flynn and (b) go sight seeing.

WordCamp San Francisco was amazing. I was very happy with how my lightning talk turned out and had some great conversations as a result with others in higher education. There aren’t really words to describe the experience at the community summit and contributor days. What an intense week.

And the Pullman WordPress Meetup! We’re now 24 strong and have had a successful 7 meetups. Every month I leave wondering why it took an entire year to finally start this up. We have such a great community of people.

Web Conference at Penn State

The Web Conference at Penn State was a good break from WordCamps and a much different crowd than I’m used to. I wish I had a video to share, but no go. PSU was a great host and I met several people on the web team(s) there and came away very inspired by what others at big schools were already doing with WordPress.

Location

No moving! We stayed in Pullman and we stayed in the same rental, a 12 minute walk to work. After all the moving we’ve done over the last several years, it was nice to pause for a minute.

We did travel a bit. I’m happy to have lived in this area as the scenery is pretty amazing. We made it up to Nelson, BC a couple times. To Missoula, MT twice. A route almost entirely around Idaho on the way down and back from the Grand Tetons. A few weeks back home in IL. A crazy trip to State College, PA via midnight rental from Pittsburgh. A nice walk around Bowen Island after a ferry from Vancouver.

Beer

Strong Belgian Ale, Burtonian English Pale Ale, Blackberry Stout, and a Scottish ale a couple days into its primary ferment. While I’d like to ramp up on variety, that will likely only happen if I switch to smaller carboys. 5 gallons goes a long way!

Now it’s time to continue watching Twin Peaks and pop some bubbly at midnight. Reflecting can wait another year. You all are wonderful, thanks for being here and a happy 2015!