This last year felt like it took forever with so many things happening. Each quarter of the year I was presented with a different challenge and opportunity person growth (however cheesy that sounds).
- Image by booleansplit via Flickr
The year revolved mostly around my work at Zemanta as I spent most of my waking hours doing something for the project.
Q1 ’08 gave me my first real full time job and opportunity to see what it takes to take care of a big part of a project. Lessons were mostly in engineering, quality assurance and testing as well as planning and letting go of the things that you can’t complete in time. At the end of the day, I’m happy that Marko S. took over so I could continue learning from him as he’s a much better skilled at all these things.
Q2 ’08 was mostly a lesson how to do user support and gather user feedback. Much less coding and more work on User Interfaces and talking to users, figuring out bugs and what we needed to to do to make a great product in the end. Started a bit with traveling as a community manager.
Q3 ’08 lots and lots of traveling and connecting to people directly in person. Through the year I’ve visited London, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, Cork, Copenhagen and many more great places. Interestingly enough, there was a huge overlap of people that I’ve met at these events, making me realize just how small the Web 2.0 community of doers really is. More great lessons on connecting with people and about building relationships across multiple countries and continents.
Q4 ’08 finally brought in more focus other things. I’ve finally started to run, making it a big part of my day and I’m slowly starting to see results in terms of better health and more positive world view. I also shifted my every day work more towards marketing which is an area I’m not enjoying that much, but I have to learn more about it to make a final decision.
Overall it was a great year and I wouldn’t change it in any way.
My plans for 2009 are modest, focusing mainly on more sports to finally get in shape as well as working more with different communities around open source, web and usability.That’s probably going to translate to more active involvement in Kiberpipa and organization of diferent BarCamps in Slovenia (we’re already making plans for second one).
I’d also like to invest more time in creating visualizations and continuing my studies as I’m feeling that I missed a large part of social informatics that really interests me.
Thanks to everyone that made this year such an incredible experience! 🙂