2015 went by in a hurry, so much that I missed the usual day of reflection and am starting off 2016 with one instead. 🙂
Some notables.
I did better at reading.
The challenge of 25 books was too high, but 14 feels good. I’ll read more next year.
One of the reasons that I read more books over the last year is because I started focusing on it more. As of sometime in the last several months, our phones started spending the night elsewhere in the house. The lack of looping distractions before bed—Twitter, Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Facebook—allows for much more focused reading time instead. Much more focused reading time makes for faster and more attuned reading.
All in all, a good decision.
That much more focused reading time finally allowed me to finish Ulysses after a 3 year struggle. And now that I’ve finished it once I’ll probably go back and try to read it again to understand. But not in 2016. 🙂
If you read, you should add me as a friend on Goodreads! If you haven’t used Goodreads yet, here’s a good explainer.
But not necessarily so great at writing.
I published 30 posts on jeremyfelt.com in 2015, compared to 26 in 2014. That’s not exactly what I had in mind last year when I wrote “An average of one thoughtful post a week wouldn’t be horrible.”
But closer I guess. 🙂
We’re still in Pullman.
We moved in June from a rental house to apartment land. The transition has been nice in some ways, though the house was also pretty nice. We’re enjoying the area quite a bit and while we’re consistent in our back-and-forth about leaving or staying, we now tend to land on staying during most conversations. See also the part where moving is just a crappy experience.
We got rid of some stuff.
In the move from house to apartment, we were able to downsize a bunch of crap that had collected. I did finally get rid of that netbook from 2010 and those two laptops from 2008. How they managed to tag along this long is a disappointment.
I freelanced.
And actually met my goal of 100 hours even though I didn’t really get moving until June or July. I learned quite a bit about myself and some about working too much and getting burned out. I’m happy to have a steady and well paying job and I love contributing to open source software when I’m at home. I’m not entirely sure how freelance fits into that schedule yet, but I’m still working out the details. 2016 will probably be a bit more focused in how I apply freelance time.
I bottled a beer.
Almost a no-brew year. I couldn’t even remember if I had brewed this year until I looked at my photo library. It appears I brewed my last on December 28th, 2014, which means I finished it in late January. So, I’m still a homebrewer, technically. I’ll get started on some small batch stuff soon.
Travel!
I should have known when I set a goal of visiting a new country last year that there would be no new country. Oh well. We had a blast anyway.
- Silverton, OR in February for Zach and Jennifer’s wedding. We took advantage of being in the area and drove out to the coast for a day and night at Cannon Beach before heading home.
- Seattle, WA in March for WordCamp Seattle where I didn’t speak but ended up on a panel at the last minute.
- Las Vegas (and Henderson) in May for LoopConf (where I spoke) and some Vegas-ing.
- Portland, OR in May for, get this, an Ikea trip. We basically arrived, ate, and went to Ikea.
- Penticton, BC in June for a couple sunny days in gorgeous Canada wine country.
- Seattle, WA in July for a night to catch the NoFilterShow, which starred several YouTube personalities.
- Vancouver, BC in August for WordCamp Vancouver. I had a chance to visit the UBC campus and hangout with Richard and team after stopping by the massive (!) blue whale exhibit. And then of course a few days of beer touring from the ever so knowledgeable Flynn and friends. The Vancouver crowd is so great.
- Glacier National Park for the first time in August! We only spent a couple days, and forest fires were blazing, but it was still such a gorgeous area. We’ll be back. There’s a great breakfast spot in Whitefish, MT and the Cheap Sleep Motel was shockingly pleasant. We then drove from Whitefish, MT to meet our friends in West Yellowstone for a couple days of hanging out in Yellowstone. It was Michelle’s first time and I hadn’t been there since 2004 or something. Such a fascinating place. And then! We drove from West Yellowstone to Bozeman for a nice last minute visit with my Aunt and Uncle for a couple days. We got in a couple great hikes and many great conversations. Lucky for us, we stumbled in with perfect timing to catch the local premiere of Meru including a nice Q+A afterward with Conrad Anker. You should see that movie.
- In September, we drove off on another adventure. We stopped for a night near Devils Tower, hiked in the morning and then took off for Estes Park, CO. I’m not entirely sure why we stayed in Estes Park, but it was a fun reminder of one of the first trips Michelle and I took together (West!) from the Chicago area. We then kept going to Denver and to celebrate my Mom’s birthday. On the long way home we stopped in Glenwood Springs, CO for one night, spent an afternoon touching f’ing dinosaur bones in Dinosaur National Monument, and then relaxed for a couple days in Park City, UT, enjoying a really excellent hike in the process. On the (still going) continued long way home, we made a stop in Portland specifically for Vegan Beer Fest, at which we met Flynn! A lot of miles on that trip. 🙂
- Made it back to Portland, OR a few weeks later for the reborn WordCamp Portland in October, where I spoke and had a great time being in Portland with everyone.
- New York City for the first time right at the end of November for a WordPress core committer summit. I did not have time to sight see, but I did witness the existence of the Statue of Liberty at 3am from an Uber headed to my hotel from the airport. Sweet!
- Philadelphia, PA for the first week of December for the WordPress community summit and first WordCamp US. That was an excellent, though draining week. Can’t wait for next year! 🙂
I found myself speaking.
I didn’t apply and/or didn’t get accepted much this year, but still ended up in a speaker role several times.
- At WordCamp Seattle, I was on a (very homogeneous) panel covering WordPress at Scale.
- At LoopConf, I gave my Multisite talk for the first time and thought it went pretty well.
- At WordCamp Vancouver, I filled in at the last minute with a version of that same multisite talk and enjoyed it even more.
- And at WordCamp Portland, I gave a somewhat boring—but may still have legs in the future—talk on the power of community in higher education.
And of course, WordPress.
I’m still a fan, still a student, still plugging away, and still a committer. 🙂
We had what felt like a pretty consistent set of releases this year in 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4. No big surprises, everything on time for the most part.
And I now have a great memory of sitting down for lunch in the lodge next to Old Faithful with an Old Faithful beer and receiving a Twitter notification during a brief moment of cell service letting me know I had been given “permanent commit”. 🙂
I need to do a bigger mental regroup on what we accomplished in 2015 for the multisite component. We at least got WP_Network in, but there are several smaller wins as well. There’s a goal for 2016—better reflection!
Washington State University (#gocougs)
We’re still cruising! Right at the beginning of December, we hit 1000 hosted sites on our platform with just about 2000 users and 2 million page views per month.
These numbers are important because we still haven’t enabled open registration. Instead, a large number of institutional sites are in WordPress that could probably often be considered stagnant. This includes many that we thought would take years to be in.
Bonus highlight – we launched a brand new wsu.edu in March! Having that in WordPress has been amazing. Having it default to HTTPS on HTTP/2.0 makes me personally happy. 🙂
And that’s that.
There’s always more. See you in December!