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.