2013 - A good year

By Jon Archer

I thought I’d finish off the year with a bit of reflection, overall it’s been a pretty good year in both camps of my life - the geek/tech and the family side. Obvious highs of the year include:

  • Birth of my second child, Alfie.
  • OggCamp 13
  • LinuxCon Europe
  • Barcamp Blackpool
  • RossLUGs 3rd year - some fantastic meetings this year.

It certainly has been a full on year.

It’s been a really tech filled year, as since moving house last September I’ve had my own space for all my tech which is a real bonus. It’s allowed me to really get back into electronics with Arduino building the home automation system, the electric meter monitor (still to be finished) and more recently bringing a snowman christmas decoration back to life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH0vd2c34zo

As part of my job heavily entails virtualisation and storage I’ve been getting heavily into oVirt, GlusterFS and Openstack (more specifically RDO). Making commits upstream too, to both code and documentation.

One of my other highs of this year tech wise was establishing a presence on GitHub I’ve uploaded most, if not all, the code I’ve worked on this year and licensed it with GPL with great reward of folks actually looking at my code. I feel like I’ve really given something back there.

On the topic of giving back, I finally became a Fedora ambassador this year. I’ve thought about it in previous years as I’ve always used the distro and given back where I can. After an experiment of using Ubuntu solely for a while I reverted back to my much cherished comfort zone, but decided to go the whole hog and really get involved in what has turned out to be a great community. Attending the events I regularly and ones I don’t, on behalf of the project has been a rewarding experience so far.

So whats in store for 2014? Well hopefully I’ll continue on this track, more open virtualisation, more Arduino, Raspberry Pi, more Fedora. But also coming in 2014 will be another track, STEM. I recently became a STEM ambassador which will allow me to impart some of my knowlege and skills and help bring a better quality of education in the tech sector to children. I’m hoping to get involved with, and also run, Arduino, Raspberry Pi coding sessions throughout 2014 so watch this space.

All in all 2013 has been an excellent year, lets hope 2014 is as good, if not better. All the very best to you all.