Towards the end of the year, I was a little down on my activities outside of work. For the past months, I had stopped work on LockAndKeyID.com. The energy and enthusiasm I had at the beginning of the year really diminished toward the end of the year as pressures at my 9 to 5 job intensified. This year, the three members of my team who were there and brought me in to the company (we all worked for Sagent previously) either left on their own or were asked to leave. I believe there were many positive takeaways from 2005 that I can work on in 2006. I will list them here for the record.
These are not necessarily in order of importance:
* I continued to go to all but one of the Philly Java User Group meetings. This has been a decent way for me to keep a pulse on new and emerging technologies in web application development. My interest though is tending towards the new language Ruby on Rails which is said to me more formal than PHP but more flexible and easy to use than Java.
* I renewed relationships with Michael Kamfonas. I learned a lot from him building a large data warehouse for Citicorp. It's good to be in contact with him again he commands a high hourly rate for his data warehousing knowledge and is a good role model.
* I went on two interviews that were positive. I interviewed for a Pharma IT job and got an offer after one interview. It was less than I was making so I declined. I interviewed with a systems integrator to run a team of finance / data warehouse focused consultants and got pretty far before I put my foot down on traveling.
* I managed to get more experience with PHP. I built several administration screens for out LockAndKeyID application. These screens involved tying together concepts in HTML, CSS, PHP. MySQL. More importantly, my friend Brad and I worked on a lot of the machinations of getting two people to work together to build a web application. It wasn't always easy since we both had very different opinions on how to build an app. I think towards the end, we got to a point where we were insync. He's done a lot more work then I so I need to catch up in 2006.
* I continue to try to keep my network of professional friends through Christmas cards, occasional emails, get togethers, etc. I'm happy that I've been pretty good about networking. This year, I even took golf lessons and it's yet another good way to get together with old colleagues.
* I got my financial life in order. I hired a professional friend's wife who was a financial consultant. She rearranged my whole financial life and I am starting to see the results. I feel secure that my family will be in good shape if anything happens to me. I have a workable plan for getting my kids into college and myself into a comfortable retirement.
* I continued to build on my specialization of dealing with the Finance department. I assisted in helping to pass a Sarbanes Oxley audit. It seems that my ETL skills can serve a valuable role in post-QA. When you tie the disparate systems together and they can not accurately reflect company assets and liabilities to the standards of finance, there are opportunities to get involved in pinpointing transactional systems deficiencies and help to fix them. If a company can not be measured accurately, it has no business in being public and it offers it's executives poor visibility into making decisions. At some point, these things need to be reigned in if the business is to scale.
* I enriched myself by reading several books and audio books. I read The 8th Habit by Steven Covey, 2 books about Amazon.com, Listened to The Way To A Meaningful Life by the Dhali Lama. I also read half of Stephen King's 'On Writing'. I am already on an aggressive pace to read twice as many things this year. More input...
* Lastly, my family and extended family continues to grow in 2005. I am expecting a new child in April. We got Alyssa involved in piano. We finished reading Harry Potter together. She read 100 books over the summer. Maya learned to walk and her vocabulary has been increasing each day. We had some tough hits to each of our health situations but continue to build a strong family with cherished friends and family.
