So this is the New Year…

So 2011 is well and truly over and 2012 is here. It’s usually around this time of the year that we are thinking about what we have or haven’t achieved this year and what we plan to do for the next. I have been doing a fair bit of thinking myself and decided to put the past year in perspective. Mainly to help me focus on what I would like to achieve this year, but also an overview of what has been a hectic year (mainly on a personal level).

2011 has been a busy year for me. Getting married to my beautiful wife Samantha and moving into our new home has set about many challenges along the way. Thankfully this all paid off nicely. An achievement that makes me very proud, as well as it being one of the happiest days of my life. Our wedding was in September, so as you can imagine plans and preparations begun alot earlier than this.

As well as the wedding, there was also the small issue of preparing our new house for us to be able to move straight into after our Honeymoon. After eventually getting rid of the worst tenants in human history it was time to decorate and get some furniture in.

Moving forward within development…
To begin with, I was involved with two projects at Virgin Media. We introduced Sky Content to Virgin Media Player as well as rebuilding our home page. Both have been a success and there is even more to come from us this year, so watch this space..

I didn’t set out too many extra curricular professional goals as it was always going to be a very busy period for me. One of the goals I had was to build a myself a new portfolio and blog, but due to time constraints I never really got further then sketches and content structure. What I did do however is a great deal of planning and researching within the industry and attend a couple of interesting conferences. Purchasing a Kindle turned out to be a great buy for reading the entire A Book Apart collection as well as buying a couple of nice books from 5 Simple Steps including Hardboiled Web Design by Andy Clarke and A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts. March saw me attend the Brighton based Geek Ninja Battle which included some interesting talks for Andy Clarke and Sarah Parmenter and gave me something to think about with regards to Native/Web App development.
Later in the year was the Web Directions @ Media two day event which I found very interesting and included a number of talented Design and Development based speakers.

So my plans for the year ahead…
Well, we have pretty much settled into our home now so this year is going to be all about personal development. Having spent so much time reading about new technologies and having very little time to put them into practice, this is going to be the year for progression. I’m also hoping to attend a conference or two along the way if possible.

It’s going to be a busy year at Virgin Media as we have some big plans for the year.
I would also like to take on some client based work and have one in the pipeline already which is good, allowing me to put some HTM5 and CSS3 into practice along with my continuing flirtation with JQuery.

Looking forward to this year it’s going to be a good one.