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:
Google Hangouts, team collaboration and pop culture – a piece in 3 acts by @FrancescoK pic.twitter.com/q0l2AHitqc
— Lena (@lrnrd) February 27, 2015
Had a quick thought and posted what turned out to be my top Tweet forever (that’s so sad):
git push –force RT @BearsActHuman pic.twitter.com/SJFbseEo8u
— Lena (@lrnrd) February 5, 2015
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:
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):
Started a new job and brought cookies on my first day:
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.
Got flowers.
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:
November
After sleeping on only mattresses for the past ~7 years, I finally got a bed. This was exciting.
Traveled to Brighton:
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:
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:
?????? pic.twitter.com/yHsOoHHm1S
— Lena (@lrnrd) December 29, 2015
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:
