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2012 the year that was

So that was 2012. I set out with a few goals for this year. Some met, some ignored and some forgotten :)

As it happened I was talking to Simon and David of Rumblelabs fame. After that discussion it was apparent to me that I needed to update my skill base - nothing drastic but I was starting to feel the very real danger of being deskilled. So from the start of February I took to reading and listening to every podcast I could. Doing every online tutorial I could.

I finally got round to giving Rails a proper go and I feel very confident in it now. So much so that I am porting the old BlackStar code base to it. It is pretty slow going with other time constraints I only get to do it now and again. However this will aid me in getting to a better understanding of the codebase it isn't for public release. I started of with Rails 3.0 and have been keeping it running happily on Heroku. The codebase itself was much more than just a website - it is a farily interesting project.

Node was another language that got a go last year and I like it. I've used it in production in my new job. I wanted something to emulate the twitter firehose in our internal tests - so I used node to do that. Yes I could have used something else but this was just a nice way of getting node into the wild. A few internal apps for my own benefit also but nothing drastic.

Sinatra also should get a mention. You can see on my github account a few apps (maybe they are hidden I can't recall). I quite like Sinatra and I would favour it above Rails in certain cases.

Heroku is the new star of 2012 though. I never really gave PaaS much thought before 2012. I have two servers of my own, a Virpus one which does next to nothing and a big wet fish one - which again doesn't do much. I really never needed to bother with PaaS and just ignored it. How stupid of me!! I recently ported my own site to Heroku. I have several apps running on it, node.js, rails and sinatra. Apparenlty you can run php on it also - but any of my PHP code is self hosted. I might port them at some stage but I think it is safe to say that I lurrrrve Heroku now. Need to give the other companies a go though but since Heroku does all I need and all my internal scripts point to the heroku toolbelt I'll need a good excuse to try something else.

Github - I love github. As well as offering a great service their staff offer great talks and papers on development. In fact I love them so much that I give them money every month! Now its only 12 'US Dollah' but still its something. I could easily host my own git repos but I get so much from this company on any given work week that I feel I should give them something back. I also moved my blog to github pages, I still need to move over my enteries from Sep 2001 - 2006 though - it is a slow process.

In conclusion I learnt so much last year and I have no doubt I am a much better developer than I was this time last year. That was my main aim of last year and I think I made it. Should be easy enough to keep all this topped up.

I've got a few resolutions for 2013 - I'll add a new blog entry half way through the year and hopefully I'll be able to tick a few off :)

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