A Happy New Year to everyone. This blog post is cross-posted from my personal blog.
Looking Back - 2009
After a difficult start to the year as a result of the lingering financial crisis, 2009 has been a year of moderate recovery. While many who are retired or close to retirement age are still concerned about their pensions, the situation has improved for most of us, as we slowly crawl out of recession.
For me 2009 was another good year. My employer, DNN Corp grew in leaps and bounds, from 6 employees at the end of 2008 to about 30 employees (and contractors) at the end of December. At the end of 2008 we obtained Series “A” investment capital, and our investors August Capital and Sierra Ventures must be quite pleased with our success last year - in a difficult climate for startup companies - as we achieved all of our business targets for the year.
On January 1st 2009, I received notice that I was being renewed as a Microsoft ASP.Net MVP (my third year) and in Spring of 2009 I attended my 3rd MVP summit in Seattle, where I was able to network with all my peers. While these summits are important for Microsoft to get feedback from the MVPs, for me the networking opportunities are the real reward.
In June, Andrew our son graduated from Simon Fraser University (right), and as proud parents we attended a wonderful ceremony on Burnaby Mountain. In October he moved to Seattle to start his career at Microsoft as an SDE (Software Development Engineer) in the ASP.NET team. It is strange not having him around at home, but it is time for him to establish his own life.
During the summer our daughter Jen worked for DNN Corp at our Abbotsford Engineering office as an intern – its great when the kids both follow in your footsteps. :)
In August we all went to England to visit my parents and sister. While we were there we spent a week on the continent (3 days in Paris and 3 days in Amsterdam).
Looking Forward – 2010
This morning I received an email from Microsoft with a renewal of my MVP for 2010 – that’s four years now. I feel tremendously honoured to be an MVP. Now I can start to plan seriously for the annual summit in February.
In February the Olympics will be in Vancouver. It is a great honour for our city but its going to be crazy for those two weeks.
I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked in 2009, so one of my New Year’s resolutions is to increase my blogging frequency – especially in DotNetNuke related blogs. DotNetNuke has been great for my career, and I need to give back my experience and knowledge to the community. So the plan is to blog once a week at least.
I also made a resolution to speak at conferences and user groups more this year. So in January I will be speaking at the Seattle DotNetNuke User Group on Module Development and in March I will be speaking at the .NET BC User Group about Windows Azure development. And of course I hope to be able to attend the two Open Force conferences in Holland and Vegas in the fall.
We haven’t made any travel plans yet for 2010, but I expect we will spend a week or two in Atlantic Canada and/or New England in June. My wife Eileen was elected as a delegate to the 2010 Anglican Church of Canada’s General Synod being held in Halifax, Nova Scotia in early June so it makes sense to take advantage of that to spend some vacation time in that part of the world.
I have visited all the provinces from Quebec west (Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and of course my home province British Columbia), but I have not visited any of the Atlantic provinces, so I am hoping to at least visit New Brunswick and PEI in addition to Nova Scotia this June – any DotNetNuke User Group in that area want me to speak??
To conclude, I wish everybody a Happy New Year. If 2009 was bad for you, I hope 2010 will be better. If 2009 was good for you, I hope 2010 will continue that trend.