title: “2006 in review” date: 2007-01-09T04:59:00-04:00 type: post categories:
- review
It seems to be a trend to be reviewing last year. I feel the peer pressure. PRESSURE. Here goes:
Personally
- Given how early my brithday is, I started off the year by turning 28.
- I went to the gym – more than once. In fact, I went a whole lot (4-5 days/week) and it felt great. Sometime in September, it fell apart and I stopped going. Resolution for 2007 – start going again.
- My youngest daughter was diagnosed with Alopecia Areata and has lost about 50% of her hair. Lisa and I are coping. She’s quite adorable, so that makes things easier!
- My grandfather passed away.
- Lisa and I miscarried in January.
- We’re pregnant (we think with a girl) due May 21st.
- Zoe started at Temple Isaiah pre-school and loves it. She now is able to write several words all by herself.
- I sold my childhood drumset (Vintage Premier) and bought a Roland V-Pro TD20S kit. I can now play 100 different drumsets while the kids are sleeping. (It’s electronic). I’m not all that good anymore, but I was thinking of starting a “Drumcast” as a variant to this whole Podcast craze.
- I saw Dublin, Ireland, reaffirmed my faith and saw some surrounding areas). Visited the Guiness brewery there and drank the best damn beer in the world.
- Went to Foo Camp again.
- I blogged a bit more (30 entries in 2006 up from 22 in 2005).
- And while it is cheating to talk about things that have heppened in 2007 – I’ve been married eight years as of today.
Professionally
- OmniTI had a wonderfully successful year:
- We formally rebranded our product division under the name Message Systems.
- We have the largest ESP market-share of any MTA.
- We landed key strategic customers in the ISP market positioning ourselves for a spectacular 2007.
- We purchased Brain Bulb and Chris Shiflett became a Principal.
- Laura Thomson was made a Principal at OmniTI.
- We’ve grown from 18 to 36 employees.
- Continuing the tradition of working with family, my wife now works at OmniTI.
- We moved offices, which was both traumatic and inspiring.
- Took part in the release of Ecelerity version 2.1. Damn that’s a good product :-)
- While it was near the end of the year, I got a whole lot better at tracking my time at work (how much time spent on each project).
- For a long time, I felt like OmniTI was me. I feel like our staff are making OmniTI theirs.
- I participated in an absolutely enormous (and successful) migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL.
- I’ve had the opportunity to play quite a bit with OpenSolaris and deployed several architectures on Solaris 10. It has been a refreshing experience.
- I spoke at two ApacheCons and an OSCON.
- Met Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal from the Sun kernel engineering team. While I met them in 2005, I didn’t quite realize how cool the stuff they were working on was.
- I finished and published my book Scalable Internet Architectures in July. For a small book, it is densely packed with content and was a serious undertaking.