This was 2018!

Well, an intense 2018 : traveling and climbing with old and new friends, making steady progress in climbing level, learning new techniques, practising and refining them, both in climbing and professionally :

• FOSDEM
  
• Config management Camp in Ghent
• Climbing in Gorges du Tarn en Gorges de la Jonte with Vertical Thinking, including two multipitches (Le jardin enchanté, and diagonal du Gogol)
• Climbing in Fontainebleau with Alex and Tom, doing lots of yellow, orange and blue routes in L'éléphant, Apremont and Roche aux sabots.
• Climbing trip to Ettringen, practicing some trad techniques, first time climbing Basalt
• Climbing trip with Vertical Thinking to Guillestre (Haut Val Durance), doing 2 nice multipitches (4-5 pitches including a 6a)
• Climbing day with Koen and Wouter in Moha
• Visiting Romania (Moldova and Transilvania region) with Eduard and Ecatarina : Lady's rock, Vatra Dornei, Dochia Caban and Toaca Peak, Transfagarasan, Sighisoara, Bran castel, Brasov, Iasi
• Short citytrip in Vienna (during a 22h layover between two flights)
• Multipitch climbing with Koen in Yvoir, also exploring Anhée
• Climbing training working towards 6c.
• Percona Live Europe in Frankfurt
• Climbing trip to Siurana with Rouslan and Rat : leading my first 6b (redpoint), 6b+ toprope and projecting a 7a
• Quick visit to Barcelona
• Visiting 35C3 conference in Leipzig, another 4 days of infosec, IT, technology and science. First year as an 'angel', volunteering to help with some tasks at the conference. Unfortunately, bound to my hotel room due to illness for half of the conference. Luckily, all talks are recorded and streamed, so I could I could follow a few from my bed : https://media.ccc.de
• Spending New Year's Eve in a doctor's office and looking for a pharmacy, due to earlier mentioned illness.

Plans for 2019 :

- more climbing : training for 6c/7a, fall-training to get more comfortable while leading, climbing trip to Buis-les-baronies in April, maybe a trip to Boulder, Colorado, possibly an alpine experience in the summer or a climbing trip in the US west coast in autumn

- continue Rock maintenance with Belgian Rebolting Team.

- find a new house, preferably with a small garden

- conferences : FOSDEM, Config Management  Camp, Percona Live (Austin, Texas), Percona Live Europe, 36C3

- first time Rock Werchter (Tool is coming)

This was 2015 and plenty to do in 2016!

2015 was an amazing year, learning a lot and making some progress in my Open Source development and climbing activities.
Buildtime Trend keeps growing, with Angular and a Facebook Open Sourced project as new users, improving my Python and JavaScript skills, setting up a CherryPy based service on Heroku, backed by a Celery/RabbitMQ task queue to make the service more responsive.

I have no real resolutions for 2016, I'll just spend my time on climbing and Open Source software development, learning new skills along the way and putting them into practice :

• use Ansible (or another configuration management tool) to provision a Vagrant based development environment for Buildtime Trend
• start using Django to add user management to Buildtime Trend as a Service
• learn how to climb safely in less equiped areas using friends, nuts, and other mobile protection
• apply the lessons learned form "The Rock Warrior's Way' while climbing
• visit a few conferences : FOSDEM, 33C3 and Newline, and maybe some more : LinuxTag, DebConf, FossAsia, KeenCon, ...
• do some improvements to my house

Plenty to do in 2016! I wish anyone an joyful year full of insights and opportunities to learn and improve.

And remember, it's all about enjoying the journey!

Here are some highlights from 2015 :

• Celebrated New Year in Lisbon.
• Reached a 365 day commit streak contributing to Open Source projects, with 2300+ commits over that period.
• visited FOSDEM 2015, another great weekend of Open Source enthousiast meeting and sharing knowledge in Brussels, with over 500 speakers and 5-10.000 visitors. Happy to meet Eduard and Ecaterina again who came over from Romania, and many others.
• Buildtime Trend was mentioned in the Black Duck newsletter 

  #OpenSource Wrap Up featuring new projects from #Facebook and #Google and a #ProjectSpotlight on @buildtime_trend http://t.co/WPo18wndI9
  — Black Duck Software (@black_duck_sw) February 13, 2015

• Buildtime Trend made it to the top 3 of hot projects on OpenHub
• Reached the most active developers top 10 on OpenHub
• Released Buildtime Trend v0.2 and launched a Heroku app hosting the service.
• Visited Cork and Dublin with Sofie, attending Jeroen's PhD graduation ceremony and meeting Rouslan and his friends.
• Attended Newline 0x05 and did two talks : Buildtime Trend : Visualise what's trending in your build process and What I learned from 365 days of contributing to Open Source projects
• Ended my commit streak after 452 days
• Went on a climbing trip to Gorges du Tarn
• Flashed my first 6a lead climbing on rock.
• Traveled to the US, East coast this time, visiting Washington DC, meeting Lieven H and Wim, exploring New York City with Tine, Lukas and Marie-Hélène.
• One-day climbing trip to Freyr with Peter.
• And another climbing trip to Beez with Lieven V, Ben, Patrick and others.
• 4th blood donation, convinced Tine to join me for her first donation! Well done!
• Deployed a Celery/RabbitMQ based worker to Buildtime Trend as a Service on Heroku, taking some load off the webservice and improving the response times.
• Climbing trip to La Bérarde, with Bleau, doing my first multipitches (Li Maye laya and Pin Thotal) with Mariska and lead climbing a few 6a+ routes. Weather was great, atmosphere was superb, climbing was fun!
• Went to Fontainebleau for the birtdayparty of Andreas. Great fun, nice people, lots of routes. Finished my first red route in Fontainebleau.
• Travelled to California and made roadtrip from San-Francisco, to Yosemite, over Tioga Pass to Mojave Dessert, Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and flying back from Phoenix to San-Francisco. I did some climbing and hiking, took a climbing course on using cams and nuts. On the way I met a lot of nice people, with whom I had interesting conversations.
• Released Buildtime Trend v0.3
• Finished online Stanford University course Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 1
• Read The Rock Warrior's Way, a must read for any climber
• Visited 32C3 in Hamburg, 4 days of lectures, writing software and talking to other developers. It was amazing, next year again!

What a year

2011 has been amazing. There were a lot of firsts and a few big changes in my life :

I bought a house. One of my resolutions for 2011 was to find a new place to live and I managed to do this. This time last year I had no idea I would now be sitting in the living room of my own house, writing this post.
It all went rather quick, first looking for a new apartment/house to rent, then deciding to buy one, followed by the search, finding one, and then all the administration and negotiating with the bank and finally, moving in and doing small construction works.

In the mean time I was a first time mentor for phpMyAdmin in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. My student made phpMyAdmin compliant with Drizzle database, a MySQL fork.


Because of this mentoring, I was invited by Google to attend the GSoC Mentor Summit, which was a great experience, meeting a lot of interesting people and discussing FOSS and GSoC related issues at Google Headquarters.

This also meant I got to travel to the US, another first, and visit San Francisco and a part of California. This was an amazing experience.


For 2012 I have some goals and resolutions :

• continue contributing to Open Source
• be a GSoC mentor again
• write an extensive article/blogpost about good passwords practices, or set up a website/wiki dedicated to it.
• build a homemade transistor using ice (solid water), or write about the theoretical possibility
• start reading again and keep a steady reading pace. I didn't manage to keep up reading in 2011.
• further improve my house

Happy 2011!

Happy New Year!

May 2011 be a year of friendship, love, joy and happiness, good health and prosperity!

2010

A lot of things happened in 2010. I'm not going to write an exhaustive list, but will just mention things that spring to mind.
On a technological level : I got my new server and installed linux on it, I learned to use vim and git, and started contributing to the Open Source community by joining the phpMyAdmin development team. I visited FOSDEM for the first time and will certainly do so this year.
On a professional level : I created a new website for my department using Drupal, and installed a new backup server.

One of my resolutions for 2010 was to read more, and I achieved this. If possible I read a chapter every evening, and I hope to continue doing this in the new year.
I also spent quite some time playing games, watching films and series and (re)discovered some music. Some of the highlights of the year : Assissin's Creed II, the best game I played in years; Isbells and Mumford & Sons, the latter doing some great gigs; and 1984, classic by George Orwell. :)

And I met a lot of interesting people, made new friends and got to know some people better.

Resolutions 2011

Bit a more of the same of last year. I made some progress, but there is always room for improvement :

• Smile (even) more!
• Enjoy more and worry less
• Continue reading
• Be more confident
• Look for a new place to live

Happy New Year!

First and foremost : A happy 2010!
May your wishes come true, may you be prosperous in your endeavors and have good health!

For me 2009 was a year with some fruitful events, like getting a new job, but there was some disappointment and misfortune - my grandfather passed away - as well. Hopefully I will learn from all that occurred and keep a fond memory of the nice things that happened.

And now for the resolutions! Last year I had one big resolution : smile more. And I must say I managed to do that! There is still room for improvement, but it went well.
So this year's resolutions are :

• smile (even) more!
• Be happier, enjoy more and worry less
• Read more
• Find a goal, something to believe in
• procrastinate less