All I remember about the start of 2011 is work-related: it kicked off with us getting Billmonitor onto The One Show and finding out what happens when a tiny website gets mentioned on prime time TV. Turns out that the website falls over - not a huge surprise. That was in May, though, if I remember correctly, and I have no idea what happened before then. Fortunately, my blog is at hand with notes to correct me.
In March I released Texturecraft, which was something I expected to be a long term project, but despite a pretty good reception, I found that I didn't particularly enjoy working on it. I guess the problem is that I don't actually use Minecraft texture packs at all, so I never actually needed the site myself. Oh well. I do keep it maintained but I don't really have any plans to add to it at the moment. It gets in the region of 800 unique visitors per month.
In June, I went to the Suffolk show, which was a lovely day out in a field with plenty of wine and food to enjoy. I'd heard about it from my in-laws for quite a few years but had never had the opportunity to go until this year, and it did not disappoint!
On the 4th July I started my new job, only my second serious position, and I've been hard at it since. It's a very demanding project but it is also very exciting. I passed my driving test shortly after so that I could drive to work, and by far the worst bit about the job has been the drive, but really I don't mind it much at all. I find that with enough podcasts queued up I never really think about it - I just miss the 2 hours a day that I spend in the car. My running has suffered lately because after being on the go for 11 hours I never really feel like running, but I'm determined to get back to it this year now that I am coping a little better with the workload and the transport.
There was a lot of bad news in the second half of the year, which I don't think I want to go into online. Some things are better kept off the internet. I couldn't really do it all any justice anyway. Suffice to say it's nothing to worry about.
I got a lot of books read this year, and would have managed one a month (That's a lot for me, ok? Shush!) if it wasn't for the epic Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which has been with me since about September.
I got round to writing a few more tiny little games toward the end of the year - nothing releasable, which is a bit of a letdown, but I learnt a lot, so that's ok.
I also achieved some degree of measurable success with a piece of code I wrote! My Dota 2 Stream Viewer is used by about 2,500 people around the world. I'm very happy with that, but I thought I'd be a lot more excited about it than I am. I guess that's because it doesn't have much potential to grow - I can't really make money from it or add many features - so it doesn't offer many future possibilities. Oh well - I'm still happy about it, and it's a benchmark for my next project.
I think I did manage to spend some more time with people this year, so that's one resolution met, and although I didn't make any money from code (apart from my job, obviously) I did have some success. I ran a 10k too, so that got done.
This year, my resolutions are: get into some of my cookbooks and cook more stuff out of them, run at least 500k across the whole year (2011 was a 344k year), and find a project that keeps me interested for more than a few months.
