blog/_posts/2014-12-29-2014-in-many-words.md

extends: post.liquid title: 2014 in many words date: 29 Dec 2014 15:00:00 +0100 path: /:year/:month/:day/2014-in-many-words

My year in numbers

Important things first: I got about 12 new T-Shirts for my collection (I didn't count them).

I had my very first real job interview (I didn't get the job, but had a nice time in Dublin).
I traveled about 35000 km in a plane, spread across 8 flights, the longest from San Francisco to Frankfurt.
I probably traveled another 5000 km in trains, to and from home to Dortmund, Kamen, Berlin, Hamburg, ...
I visited 9 different conferences in 7 different cities across 4 different countries:

1. FOSDEM in Brussel, Belgium (February)
2. eurucamp in Berlin (August)
3. FrOSCon/RedFrogConf in Sankt Augustin (August)
4. reject.js in Berlin (September)
5. jsconf EU in Berlin (September)
6. RailsCamp Germany in Cologne (September)
7. The next Web Barcamp in Salzburg (October)
8. IETF 91 in Honolulu, USA (November)
9. 31c3 in Hamburg (December)

I held 3 talks this year, twice the same Rust talk, both times spontaneous to fill time, and once a Redis talk.
I held 3 different workshops, twice for the OTS DO coaching HTML & CSS and Javascript and once as part of the Barcamp Salzburg, coaching Hoodie.

I published 20 blog posts covering a wide range of topics.
I wrote more than 8200 tweets this year, most of them in reply to someone or as part of a longer rage about computers. I posted 36 photos on Instagram and my ~/photos/2014/ directory now contains about 3000 other photos.

In total I made 380 countable contributions on GitHub (or 879 if you count private repositories as well) and took part in hundreds of issues.
We saw 18 releases of Redis, I was mentioned 4 times in the release notes and became #5 in the list of committers (though only 19 commits so far).
I sent 120 mails to the Redis mailing list (if I can trust my local mail copy).
I learned a new language, Rust, and immediately released 4 libraries.

For the university, I wrote a 15-page paper, containing about 7500 words.
I wrote 6 exams and passed each one.
I wrote a 50-page thesis, containing about 21000 words and made 233 code commits across 4 different repositories for the thesis.
I finally got my Bachelor in Computer Science after 3 years of studying.

I attended 3 different sport tournaments with the Handball team of my university, winning one with my team by accident. For the first time in my life I actually played Beach-Handball, the whole summer long once a week.

2014 was an amazing year for me.

Thanks

All of the above was only possible because I had so many people supporting me, working with me, discussing with me, hosting me, sponsoring me, partying with me or traveling with me. That's why I want to say thanks to all these people.

Thanks to the great Hoodie community, which I am proud to be a part of. Special thanks to Jan, Gregor, Ola and Lena for the discussions and a few funny hangout sessions. Very special thanks to Lena for hosting the Hoodie Workshop at the Barcamp in Salzburg with me.

Thanks to Hannes and Stephan for inviting me to Salzburg.

Thanks to the Open Tech School Dortmund team, Ola, Carsten, Leif and Hendrik. These are the nicest people, investing their free time to provide awesome talks and workshops for free. They encouraged me to coach at workshops and to finally hold a talk. I know they will keep this going in 2015!

Thanks to my employer rrbone and my boss Dominik for making it possible for me to learn, to work on what I love, and to sponsor me trips to some of the conferences.

Thanks to Lotte for joining Dominik and me on our trip to the US, for telling me quite a bit about beer and, even better, for drinking with me.

And thanks to all the people I forgot to mention explicitely, thanks to my friends and fellow students for making lectures less boring, thanks to my family for welcoming me back everytime I head back home.

There are already a lot of things planned for 2015, so it will be just as busy as this year.

<3