Year 2008 in a nutshell

December 22, 2008 by Przemysław Bielicki

Picture courtesy of foxypar4@flickr

Christmas and New Year is coming so it's time for some summary. I've never done this before but this year was quite awesome and I have something to be proud and loud.

Let's start from January when I moved from my hometown to the glamorous French Riviera i.e Cote d'azur (yes, the sea here is pretty much azure).

I accomplished some cool stuff at work and one that I can share with you is the new generation hotel search engine - Wallaby (which is working but still in beta phase).

In 2008 I started interesting in the theory of Agile Software Development (after few years of using it) which resulted in inviting me to contributing to the AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com blog. It was a huge challenge for me as I've never been a good or even decent writer (especially in my native language - Polish) but it appeared to be kind of success. I have on my account some pretty cool posts that appeared to be big hits like these (each of the following posts was visited more than 5k times):

• Can unit testing be a waste?
• Video tutorial: Test Driven Development in practice
• Developers Aren't Gonna Read It
• "I know it doesn't work but it's done" - a story about the definition of done

And the best posts were written pretty spontaneously in less than thirty minutes without any preparation. Just some kind of a thunder in my brain that triggered my grey matter to work - that was just it.

I'd like to thank Artem for inviting me to become a regular contributor - it was a good decision for me to join ASD. I hope I will keep at least the same level of inventiveness next year :)

During 2008 I've read over 18 technical books and I shortly reviewed some of them on my private blog.
More on numbers in 2008: my FeedBurner account shows quite an increase (260% from 25 to 65 - and counting) of regular readers of my private blog - that's cool. Thank you readers!

Last but not least submitting my old and fresh posts to DZone gave my private blog a lot of visibility and doing this I increased number of visits by 1000% from ~930 to over 9K in just one month (I will not be able to keep these numbers but it anyway shows me that what I write is interesting and a lot of people like it). This is also thanks to ASD blog which gave me more visibility.

And now some conclusions. As I wrote earlier I moved to southern France in January 2008 and this was caused mostly by my previous employer - Intel - who simply laid off our team at the end of 2007. My friends who I worked with at Intel opened their own company and I was supposed to be their partner but I decided to move to France with my wife. And this was one of the best decisions we made in our life.

We live in a great place, have awesome friends and every week we do some cool stuff like skiing, hiking or just visiting some beautiful places like Monaco or Eze. And this is much more important that money that I could earn staying in Poland.

I learned a lot during year 2008, the Sun hasn't burnt out my brain (yet) and consider it pretty awesome year privately as well as professionally. And I hope next year will be even better - but even if it will be a bit worse it will still be awesome :) Yes - I'm the optimist. I'm not going to reveal my professional plans for the next year but I will probably share with you the results in 365 days.

As this is my last post this year I'd like to wish all the people around the World:

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