Matthew Turland

In seeing several people doing the year’s end blog post thing, I decided to take a look at my post from last year and follow suit with one for this year.

First, I thought I’d look at the list of goals I set for this year and see how I did.

• Fail: I ended up leaving my job in Baton Rouge and also withdrawing from BROUG due to other commitments, so I wasn’t able to get very far into my term as their VP.
• Draw: I did read and write a review for one book, though it wasn’t in my existing backlog. I managed to read or at least skim through most of The Pragmatic Programmer and blog about it several times. No other reading to speak of, though.
• Win: I submitted one paper for OSCON that was rejected, then submitted four for ZendCon and got one accepted. I gave one of the others as an uncon session.
• Win: The aforementioned book review was also released as a PHP Abstract podcast episode. While it hasn’t been published yet, I do have another magazine article coming out next month that I wrote this year.
• Win: Part of the reason I haven’t done more in the way of podcasts and articles is that I did get a publishing deal and find myself a technical editor. I’m in the ever-so-slow process of writing the book now. I’m hoping it will be out in the first half of 2009 and will post updates here as they arise.
• Fail: While I did get initial code and unit tests developed for Zend_Service_RememberTheMilk, the unit tests I did ended up needing to be refactored to use local static files representing expected web service responses. In short, my interest and energy levels were depleted before that portion of the project was completed.
• Win: I did migrate my blog to Habari. I can’t say it’s been entirely stable (though it’s admittedly still pre-1.0) and without issues, but the ride has been interesting nonetheless. I may look migrating to something else later depending on how Habari does. WordPress seems to be improving, so maybe I jumped that ship too soon.
• Fail: No developments on a content management project yet, just ideas floating around. I may get around to it eventually, but for the moment I’ve got enough other projects keeping me busy.
• Fail: The local music scene web site project never got rebooted either, again due to lack of time and interest.

So 4 wins, 4 fails, and 1 draw. At least I broke even. I also did accomplish a few things that weren’t originally on my list.

• I had a large hand in rebooting the Acadiana Open Source Group, a local agnostic open source software user group. It’s had monthly meetings almost every month since April and I consider it a fair success.
• I was present for the first public offering of and among the first to take the new Zend Framework certification exam. Though it was rather last minute that I was able to get a slot, happily I was able to pass.
• I switched jobs twice. The first change was to surgiSYS, LLC. I enjoyed my work there and later made the difficult decision to leave for other opportunities at Blue Parabola, LLC, where I’m currently working and having a blast.
• I attended php|works and PHP Appalachia both for the first time. Both were immensely fun and informative events and I hope to continue my presence at both next year.
• I’m now a technical editor for php|architect magazine. So, if you submit an article for the magazine, chances are you might be working with me to polish it up before it goes to print.

And I’ve got an updated goal list for this year, of course.

• Finally finish my book and hold a published copy in my hands! (And hopefully get requests to sign a few. Hey, a guy can hope.)
• Continue this year’s success of the Acadiana Open Source Group and become involved in other technology and social media related events in the area, such as the TechSouth conference.
• Publish another magazine article. PHP podcasts, it seems, are going the way of the dinosaur. The two most well-known, PHP Abstract and P3, haven’t published episodes in a few months.
• Get accepted to speak at another conference. It’s looking like php|tek is going to be a bust for me this year. I submitted three papers – web scraping, IRC bots, and a repeat of my Zend Framework web services talk. The conference lineup does look really good, though, so I do hope I get to attend. If I do, I’ll probably do a BYOL Phergie hacking session for the uncon. (And hopefully Phergie will be to 2.0 stable by that point.)
• Get a new non-PHP certification, likely MySQL CMDEV.
• Finally get around to reading Sara Golemon’s Extending and Embedding PHP and a Christmas present from this year The C Programming Language from K&R so I can contribute to PHP in some way, be it internals or PECL.

So, I hope your New Year was as productive or more so than mine, and wish you all the best in 2009. Happy New Year!