It’s New Years Eve and what better way to spend the night then writing up a post about the last year. The biggest change this year was the birth of my wonderful daughter Katherine, who we affectionately call Rin. It truly has been life changing and while it would be nice if she slept a little bit more than she does she is an extremely cute and happy baby who is growing and learning so quickly.
I feel good about what I was able to accomplish this year. I covered some of the progress on The Lounge in an earlier post, but basically I took over The Lounge in late december and managed to quadruple the number of publishers, venture into podcast, screencast, and RSS advertising and increase the revenue by over 5x. I launched the Ruby Room which because Ruby Row and it is doing great so far. I wish I had launched more networks this year and that will be a major focus of mine next year.
I also had the pleasure of working with Microsoft and the SDS team to write the ruby library for Microsoft SDS, it was great to not only be playing with a cool new technology like SDS but to be using Ruby with it made it even better.
Earlier this year I posted some goals so here is a quick rundown of how I did.
Goal #1: Lose Weight and get into shape.
My plan to lose weight didn’t work out very well but I have high hopes for the year ahead. I never expected how much time a baby would consume and it has made it tough to get back into my running schedule. Things are starting to stabilize though and I think I will be able to get back into it and hope to run at least a 10k by the end of the year.
Goal #2: Minimize and Simplify
This isn’t a great goal since it’s hard to measure, but I do feel like I have minimized and trashed alot of clutter and that I have embraced simplicity in everything I attempt. (it is a constant struggle to keep things simple, but it is a very noble goal)
Goal #3: Stop Consulting
I didn’t manage to do this in 2008, but my long-term contract is ending Jan 15th and I will be attempting to avoid taking another long-term contract. I am open to smaller contracts, but I don’t want another 6-12 month contract and if possible I would like to avoid it completely. (more on this later)
Goal #4: Make 22books a success
Well, this definitely didn’t happen. I decided I needed to focus on The Lounge and Ruby Row over doing any work on 22books. I haven’t made any updates in months, but the site continues to work and has a small group of users. On the plus side the site has been running on a couple of mongrels without being restarted for 6+ months.
Goal #5: Grow The Lounge
I posted about this earlier this week, The Lounge has continued to grow and has started to surpass my expectations. I have huge plans for The Lounge in 2009.
Goal #6: Re-Launch Windows Developer Power Tools
I missed this one as well, my decision to focus on The Lounge and Ruby Row meant other ventures like this suffered.
Goal #7: Reset this blog
I didn’t write a post a week, I am not even sure I wrote a post a month. I can’t believe that I used to post daily back in 04, but I lived a totally different life back then… I wish I had that time now.
So while I didn’t hit alot of my goals I learned some very important lessons about focus. By neglecting 22books and WDPT as well as the blog I was able to get much more done on The Lounge and Ruby Row than I would of otherwise . I am going to keep this in mind when making goals for next year.
-James
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