Time for a short retrospective on 2014.
Late 2013 I registered an LLC in the state of Texas, and a large part of my time and energy this past year has been dedicated to building up a small consulting and development business.
It is a challenging and rewarding adventure, and I hope that will continue into 2015. I feel lucky to rely on a vibrant community of innovators in Dallas-Fort Worth, providing mentoring and inspiration.
I am sharpening my technical skills and picking up a lot of new tricks, but mostly it's a time for personal growth. I am one step closer of calling myself a Kadampa Buddhist thanks in large part to the amazing teachers at KMC Texas.
I encourage everyone this year to go after your mental and physical barriers and push through your perceived limits. If Buddhism is a bit too much, start with a Spartan Race, or try GORUCK maybe. You get the idea, get out there and be awesome.
But what about game development .. are you still doing that? Yes, of course! The Dallas Society of Play connects together some very talented indies in DFW. I'm hoping to share more on that subject soon, watch this space..
I'd like to close with a few tools and technologies that have been particularly relevant to me this year:
- Xero Accounting Software: don't bother with QuickBooks etc. .. go Xero.
- Org mode for Emacs: I use org (and emacs) for everything. I work with Windows, MacOS X and GNU/Linux - often at the same time. Having one consistent tool across all systems is very important. I use org to plan and track my time, I also use it to write up proposals and documentation.
- SaltStack: I have finally found my favorite solution for infrastructure as code. Pragmatic, easy to learn, easy to debug and powerful. I tried repeatedly to like Chef, or even use it productively - much happier with salt now.
- Docker: over-hyped? Sure it is, but still a damn good product. Finally the ticket to cleanly abstract from the cloud provider, isolate logical components easily and prepare for scalability at the early stages of development. Also it works great with salt.
- Honorable mention: Visual Assist, Droptask, DropBox, mosh and fish shell.
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