Year 2012

The year 2012 was a year of new challenges and a new start.

The year started off a little quietly, on the second day of 2012, I became an uncle for the first time, which was amazing. But it would be a couple of months before I first got to see him.
A few days later Todd started his first day at Pre-School, it was strange as it was another realisation that he’s growing up!

February was the big month of the year, as this is when I moved jobs. On paper technically I only moved to a different company, as I was employed with the same job title ‘Web Developer’, but is was far from the same. From my first day at aw20 Ltd, I have continued to learn new stuff, push boundaries, been encourage to try new things, and more.

From leaving my previous job is where the image above comes from, one of the lads made me a Back to the Future poster as a leaving gift and put my face on Marty, and it’s been my avatar ever since.

From February onwards there where no massive things to report on, but I’ve been busy ever since, with learning more and more, and trying out new ideas.

In June, two of us from aw20, got to attend the first ScotlandJS in Edinburgh, the long day of travelling was truly worth it, lots of little nuggets where picked up during the day and I am finally getting around to using them.

September Todd turned four, and started his second and final year at pre-school.

October I released a back to the future themed URL shortener called gigaw.at, which is powered by OpenBD and MongoDB, I will save all the details for a full write up which I’ve been meaning to do.

Then, November I released an open source flat file blog engine that is also powered byOpenBD, with a back to the future reference name. This came after seeing a lot of tweets one weekend about Jekyll, and Statamic, I decided to write something in OpenBD over a weekend, and to give my blog a rebirth, I wrote a little bit about it on here, I have been adding little bit’s here and there when I have needed to, and will continue to work on it.

December was a big month, with Christmas, mine and Pamela’s 4th Wedding Anniversary, and the end of the year, it seemed to all come at once… And December was my busiest month on the blog post front. I wrote 4 blog posts, released another Google Chrome Extension (an OpenBD Manual quick reference extension, read blog post ).