2009 in a Few Lists

First, the once-in-a-lifetimes:

• Garmisch and I bought our first home and moved in. Inner-city living is great!
• We organised our wedding
• And got married!
• Then had an exciting honeymoon in Phú Quốc, Sài Gòn and Hong Kong.

These were without doubt the highlights of the year, and together they form fond memories I will hold for years to come, and the backdrop to what I know will be an wonderful married life with Misch.

Plenty of other stuff happened. For starters, I accepted an offer to join the team at Icelab as Senior Developer. I’m excited to start to work with the talented folk there in just a few weeks! This meant that in December I wrapped up my couple of years at the AMC. I got to do some pretty neat things:

• Built a payments service that has since processed over $10M and handles the credit card payments for four different public applications
• Built a new redundant virtual server infrastructure to handle the AMC’s eight Rails apps, thanks to Xen, 3000 lines of custom bash scripts for automated provision (if only Chef came out earlier), haproxy and nginx for load balancers, MySQL replication, NFS shares backed by a distributed block device, and a gem chock full of shared capistrano recipes. Plenty of moving parts but things have run pretty smoothly since!
• Came back fired up from RailsConf and managed to rejig (with the vital help of the team) the development methodology for my final project: pair programming all the time; tests first all the time; cucumber features first wherever possible; weekly iterations and user stories written and prioritised by the business.
• Finally started building the simplest things that could first possibly work.
• Put a lot of energy into helping build a positive and passionate team culture.

Let’s not forget the fun outside of work:

• Went overseas for my first major web development conferences: RailsConf in Vegas and Ruby Kaigi in Tokyo.
• Entered the Rails Rumble with Max and Hugh and built Decaf Sucks. It is still going strong with over 300 reviews.
• Presented Decaf Sucks at WebJam 10 in Sydney.
• Founded a startup with three others and got busy working on our product.
• Did a little open source stuff, most notably acts-as-importable, campfire-bot, unfuddle-helpdesk and openmonkey.com.

2010 is looking like it will be a ripper!