The last week of the year is always a quiet one. Most people take holiday but most years I prefer to use the relative quiet time to catch up, reflect on the last year and think about what I want to accomplish in the year to come.
2012 has been a great, stressful, fun, frustrating educational year. Having started at Mozilla in late 2011 after spending 10 years at Microsoft, Mozilla has been an adjustment. Mozilla has nearly doubled it’s employee compliment since I started. The ethos of the organization has morphed from a primary focus on the browser to building FirefoxOS, an HTML5 phone operating system and the accompanying apps platform and marketplace.
I did a lot of coaching, business, strategy stuff this year and not as much technical work as I normally have done in my developer community work.
Though I don’t make “New Year’s Resolutions” I do have a to-do list of work items that I want to focus on this year.
- Start doing How-Do-I videos again. (HTML5 & PHP)
- Blog at least once a week.
- Start sharing all my code on GitHib.
- Conference Talks (I only did a few this year).
- Contribute to at least one Open Source Project
- Embrace the Cloud (starting with moving my blog to a could host).
- Renew my interest in iOS and write my first native iOS app.
- Organize my social media presence (separate my work and my personal identities)
Technically over the last year I focused almost exclusively on the client which is funny because I’ve always been a “server side” guy. In 2013 I plan to divide my focus between client technologies and the server interaction patterns that make for great app experiences.
First up – a two day camp on migrating apps to FIrefoxOS.
What do you plan to focus on differently in 2013?
[...] Saying good-bye to 2012 [...]
I am hoping to learn PHP and Python while growing my knowledge in HTML5. I will be looking forward to your videos as I know the ones that you created while at Microsoft were quite helpful.
Happy New Year Joe!
Going native on a phone is so 2011! All kidding aside, IMO, there’s hardly any reason to go native on a phone these days, except if you’re making some sort of game and need the graphics library that the language supports. There are a whole bevy of html5+js frameworks out there now that give a great “native” feel to your web app and even allow a lot of control to the phone’s components like the camera, accelerometer, etc.