My Twenty-fifteen

Only a few more hours are left until 2015 is coming to a close. This year went by both extremely slowly and super fast. It has been a no-good year for me, and I’m not really in a good position to write a decent retrospective right now. But I’ve done these posts before and didn’t want to give up the tradition. Also, maybe the writing will help.

January

Came back from a lovely week in Norway and went back to work leading a software dev team for an NGO.

February

Spent most of my non-work-time preparing my upcoming conference talk.

Had lots of fun with my team and Google Hangouts:

Had a quick thought and posted what turned out to be my top Tweet forever (that’s so sad):

March

Went to Salzburg, Austria, and had the great honour of keynoting the wonderful .concat().

Went on a work trip to Sierra Leone (all photos are here):

https://www.flickr.com/photos/101906241@N07/16434239463/in/album-72157651383628988/

April

Got to see jumping baby goats in the zoo:

Jumping Baby Goat ??

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As planned, I wrapped up and handed over my work with the NGO.

May

Traveled to Edinburgh. Went to my first Cèilidh (still struggling with the pronunciation) and had a blast dancing. Keynoted ScotlandJS:

Had a wonderful time in Edinburgh (all photos are here):

Edinburgh

Started a new job and brought cookies on my first day:

Making cookies for my new coworkers

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Wrote a super long blog post and never published it.

June

¯\_(?)_/¯

July

Third month with severe dental issues and pain killers. In the session during which the tooth was supposed to be fixed, it broke. Bye tooth.

August

After a veeeeeeeery long pause, I had my first piano lessons. Getting back to making music is very exciting and rewarding, and my teacher is fantastic. Unfortunately, I’ll have to stop taking lessons after only a few months. I hope to take this on again at some point in 2016.

September

A “Talk about Nothing” was shortlisted for a net award 2015 and didn’t win.

Spent my birthday sick in bed.

classic

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Got flowers.

?

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I had ~really~ looked forward to traveling to the US for the very first time in my life, and to speaking at &yetConf. Unfortunately, I had to cancel everything last-minute because I wasn’t recovering fast enough to be able to travel.

October

Got to go to Napoli for a few days (all photos are here), ate lots of pizza and enjoyed the sun:

Streets of Napoli

November

After sleeping on only mattresses for the past ~7 years, I finally got a bed. This was exciting.

Traveled to Brighton:

talking 'bout planes

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Spent a wonderful weekend wandering around the town, dried my shoes in the hotel with my hair dryer, and keynoted FullFrontal 2015:

December

Realised that, for the first time in my adult life, I’ve now been living in the same apartment for five years.

Baked cookies:

It's so on

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Wrapped up my work as CEO and co-founder of The Neighbourhoodie.

Had a wonderful time working briefly with a few people on a ~really~ nice project. Did a photo shooting with them which was really fun. This short project was the best thing that could have happened to me by end of this year.

Baked Emoji cookies:

Spent the holidays at home.

Summary

  • I traveled around 19,524 km: to Hamburg, Salzburg, Freetown, Edinburgh, Napoli, Brighton.
  • I keynoted three conferences.
  • I wrote and published 31 blog posts: 4 on Kleinerdrei, 16 on the CouchDB Blog, 6 on the Hoodie Blog and 5 on this blog.
  • I made 54 contributions on GitHub this year (oh, well).
  • I posted 1,794 Tweets.
  • I took more than 4,300 photos, including some event photography, and a few commercial photo shootings.

Some of TV Shows I watched this year (some of which I can recommend):

  • How to get away with Murder
  • Episodes
  • Empire
  • Gilmore Girls (I did two full re-watches this year, mainly because this show has proven to be a good distraction for me.)
  • Master of None
  • Scott & Bailey
  • The Good Wife
  • Suits
  • Nurse Jackey
  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine
  • Chef’s Table
  • Grace and Frankie
  • Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
  • The Mindy Project
  • Garfunkel and Oates
  • Scrubs
  • Broadchurch
  • Lilyhammer
  • Modern Family
  • Scandal
  • Grey’s Anatomy
  • Jessica Jones
  • You’re the Worst
  • I also watched a lot of standup comedy and many, many documentaries.

Things I learned this year:

  • Environments matter.
  • Building good environments is hard. And extremely rewarding.
  • Sometimes the only thing left for you to do is to remove yourself from an equation.
  • Realising that you need help is hard. Finding help once you’ve realised that you need it can be even harder.

Things I want to do next year:

  • I want to get back to traveling more. I’ve been missing that a lot.
  • I also want to work harder on amplifying the voices of people who have important things to say.
  • I also want to get better at supporting the work of other feminists in tech and at showing my solidarity with them.
  • I want to do more public speaking again. (If you know of any good events, please let me know!)
  • I also want to start looking for and find a new job.

I will remember this year as the year in which only few things started, while many things came to an end. The year in which I was mostly not who I wanted to be. And the year in which my hair finally grew longer.

Right now, I have no idea where I’m going and what’s going to happen. Most of the time, this is very frightening for me. But, hey:

“If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.”

– Beyoncé

Take care. I’ll see you next year.

***

Earlier:

20102011201220132014

By L.

I walk fast.

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