This has been the craziest year since I’ve begun blogging. Which is why I hardly blogged.
Let’s start at the beginning:
January
For the sixth year in a row, I was awarded SDL MVP. I was surprised. It’s wild to think that I’ve won that award six times on just the merits of running my mouth about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
February
I left Tahzoo.
I’d started at Tahzoo in August of 2011 as a guy who knew a little bit of HTML and CSS. I left as a 6-time SDL MVP and Principal Software Architect.
This was also the first time in 15 years that I left a company in a month other than July or August.
March
Work
I went to work at EXLRT as a Principal Solutions Consultant. It’s been really fun, lemme tell ya. For the first time since 2011, I haven’t opened Tridion, touched it, or really even talked about it.
Home
Celebrated a kid’s birthday party for the first time. My wife and I were fostering two girls. They both had birthdays in March. I’ve never really gone to a kid’s birthday party. Let alone try to have one.
The girls’ biological parents also had their parental rights terminated. Sara and I signed up to adopt them.
April
My favorite dog in the world, Lillith, died.
In true Lillith fashion, the day before Easter she ate a nest of baby bunnies. Then she went on a walkabout (walked about 1.3 miles) on Easter Sunday.
Then about a week later, I had to put her down. That sucked.
June
Work
I started diving deep into the Azure ecosystem. Especially Azure functions. I began writing small microservices running in node.js to retrieve data from some social media APIs.
My head started spinning in microservices and async-awaitiness.
Home
We celebrated a full year of being foster parents. The girls came to our home June 11 of 2018. And they were still with us a year later.
July
I turned 38, which was unimpressive.
August
One of my favorite Bible study sites is a Hebrew-English site called Mechon Mamre.
I decided I wanted a better way to browse the site. So I built a web scraper that converted the entire Hebrew-English Old Testament into JSON.
Then a few days later I built a fully functional web app using Vue with it.
A decade ago, I knew HTML and CSS. In August of 2019, I scraped a website and created structured content out of it and then built a web app on top of it. In a week.
September
I brought home this adorable puppy, Delilah. She’s no Lillith, but she’s still an asshole.
I also write fiction for fun. I decided in September to turn a short story that I’d started a few years ago into a blog. Because it seemed like the write format for the story.
If you’re into reading about elves, I might have something for you
October
I spoke at SDL Connect! I hardly talked about Tridion. Instead it was a fairly non-technical talk about Software development in general. That was a lot of fun and in general a big change from what I’ve spoken about in previous years.
I also took the opportunity to not go to any Tridion things. Instead I attended a few language sessions and workshops where I got to learn about the translation side of SDL.
Probably the most impressive thing was a workshop where I downloaded SDL Machine Translation, installed it, configured it, and had code to consume content from it all within 30 minutes.
At the end of October, I release an Azure Function node.js bootstrap so that other developers writing Azure microservices in node don’t have to start from scratch.
November
Work
I went to the Tridion Developer Summit for the first time as an attendee. It was wild. No stress about a presentation. No last minute slides. Just going to talks and learning stuff.
I helped Robert Curlette wrangle the lightning talks so that we could finish on time. That amounted to a light review of slides, setting the order, and evil stares if someone started to go too long.
Home
On November 13 My wife and I adopted two girls: Lucy and Nicole. Lucy is 10, Nicole is 3. They’re awesome.
This adoption is the culmination of 10 years of effort. Starting and stopping adoptions in Texas and Colorado, waiting for 6 years for an infant in Illinois, and then quite surprisingly adopting the first two foster children to come in to our home.
Adoption is exciting, but adopting out of foster care is heartbreaking. A family is born because another one is broken apart. It’s a huge mix of emotions every time I say, “my daughter.”
While I’d love to share their pictures, for right now I’d rather protect their privacy. Having kids has really made me rethink privacy and how to keep my kids safe.
While I’d love to share their pictures, for right now I’d rather protect their privacy. Having kids has really made me rethink privacy and how to keep my kids safe.
December
I find myself way behind on writing. I haven’t blogged almost the entire year. It’s been a bit busy with job switches, court appearances, adoption meetings, and the like.
I’m