Juno Mission ready for launch!

• January
• I started out the year continuing to work as lead developer for Empower Campaigns.
• February
• I was fortunate enough to attend the NASA Ames Tweetup on "Planet Hunting".  There I heard from a number of great speakers, but the standout one to me was the Kepler Mission's co-investigator Natalie Batalha.  Not only is Kepler a fascinating mission (that ended up having a stellar year), but Batalha is a remarkably passionate and inspiring speaker.  The event also included a tour of the research center, which was fascinating.
• I also wrote about PHP step debugging in VIM.
• March
• I wrote about organizing PHP batch jobs and also serving static content efficiently from an application.
• March also included my attendance of the NASA Sun Earth Day Tweetup at Goddard Space Flight Center.  It was a blast to tour Goddard!  Since the event was in the the DC area, I was able to visit family and attend my youngest niece's second birthday party.
• The month wrapped up with a trip to New Orleans for the state-side wedding reception of my sister in law, who was married in New Zealand the previous November.
• April
• On Easter I made this.  You're welcome.
• May
• In early May I decided to take the plunge in electric cars and reserved a Nissan Leaf.  The wait was expected to be 4 months.
• Though it wasn't a NASA Tweetup, I did make it down to JPL's annual open house in mid May, which was a bit crowded, but still spectacular.  I got to see the Mars rover Curiosity in a clean room before its launch the following November.  I also got to walk through the Space Flight Operations Center.
• I wrote about working with Kestrel from a PHP application since there didn't seem to be any other documentation on the topic.
• We also ran into some further plumbing issues at home that month, but decided to tackle the problem ourselves.
• June
• In June my wife and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary!
• We also documented another small home repair, replacing the garbage disposal.
• July
• July included a second trip back to VA, this time just to visit family.
• Unfortunately, soon after that we got the bad news that one of our beloved cats, Linus, suffers from chronic kidney disease.  He's currently doing well at a stable weight (roughly 3/4 of his previous weight) through medication and diet, and we're hoping to keep him as comfortable as possible.  There is not a known cure.
• I also finally broke down and bought my first serious telescope, a Celestron NexStar 8SE.  It's pretty rad.  I'm hoping to get into astrophotography this year.
• August
• In August I was lucky enough to attend the launch of NASA's Juno mission during my 3rd tweetup of the year.  We heard from lots of great folks on the Juno teams as well as NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was a really inspiring speaker.
• Later that month, a book that myself and a few other former Digg employees contributed to nearly 2 years before  finally came out.
• That month I attended my first TEDxNASA event "Extreme Green", which was a blast.  Lots of great speakers.   One of the more impressive talks of the day was Ed Lu's talk about how inexpensive it really would be to set up an asteroid monitoring system to help prevent a major collision, perhaps the worst natural disaster imaginable.
• Another TED talk on 30 day challenges inspired me to try cutting out Diet Coke (and all sodas) for 30 days.  Four and a half months later, I still haven't gone back.
• September
• I bough my first 100% electric car, a Nissan Leaf, which was delivered right on schedule.  The car is such a dream to drive.  It's nearly silent.  I can't wait until electric vehicles are the norm!
• Later that month I wrote about speeding up satellite predictions in PHP with hiphop which coincided with my release of Predict, a library for modeling and predicting satellite orbits.  The use case for this is a project of mine called "Where the ISS at?", which is currently in the beta testing phase and should be public very soon.
• October
• October included attending my final NASA Tweetup of the year, the SOFIA Telescope Tweetup back at NASA Ames.  We got a chance to tour the telescope, which was parked there at Ames.  It too was pretty rad.
• November
• In November we decided to take a third trip back to VA for Thanksgiving, and I finally got a chance to visit Monticello.
  

  Hot Air Balloon Ride in Sonoma!

• December
• December saw us both reaching our 40th birthdays.  For some reason, I kind of dreaded this milestone.  But once I reached it, I was actually pretty relieved.  It seems the anticipation of turning 40 was much worse than the actual birthday.  The good news is that my wife arranged our first ride in a hot air balloon up in Sonoma to celebrate.  Once you got used to the sound and awesome heat of each of the 15 million BTU burners powering the balloon, the views were nothing short of breathtaking.
• In December I also accepted a job as Engineering Manager at OpenDNS, something I'm very excited start in the beginning of January.

In front of the Nasa countdown clock

Welcome to my second annual Year in Review.  Lots of changes and exciting things happened this year, including a space shuttle launch, a house purchase, hearing damage, a job change, traveling to New Zealand, and shoulder surgery.

• In January, I started taking my new folding bike, as well as BART, to work.  Though it doubled my commute time, I started getting a LOT of reading done on BART, and continue to do it when the weather isn't bad.  I love it.
• After many years of playing music and going to live shows, I finally decided to get my hearing checked.  I've lost about 20-30% of the upper frequencies in both ears.  So here's your token reminder to ALWAYS wear earplugs when playing in loud bands, going to to hear live bands, or even riding BART!
• Also in January, I took up blogging, which has been fun.  Though only 8 posts this year, it's a start.  One of my early posts was about a test use case for using MogileFS.
• Feburary had some highs and lows.  We were able to get in a great trip to Yosemite for Valentine's day, but also found out that our cat had a bladder stone, and had to have surgery.  He's much better now.  Later that month, I put down some of my current thoughts about unit testing.
• In March I blogged for Digg about the OpenID work I was doing there.
• In April I gave a talk at the OpenID Tech Summit West.  That month I also took a position of Director of Engineering at Digg, my first management only role.
• In May, I had the amazing experience of seeing a Space Shuttle launch.  Not only was able to go there with my wife and 3 of my siblings, but I had been selected for the @nasatweetup!  This event gives you viewing access from the infamous press area (see my picture above), and included 2 days of talks from former astronauts and other NASA personnel.  Truly a once in a lifetime experience.
• In June, on our 3rd wedding anniversary, we closed on a house.  This is the same house we have rented since relocating to South San Francisco in 2008.  We planted a jacaranda tree in the backyard to mark the occasion.
• Also in June, I got an opportunity to tour the Pixar campus in Oakland.  What a cool company.
  

  Visiting Pixar

• In July, I decided to change jobs.  I'm back to coding full time, and really enjoying it.  Unfortunately, much of the identity work I had done at Digg (mentioned above), got pulled before their V4 release in August.  Though it's built and working under the Digg hood, OpenID is still not available there, despite its support having been announced in 2007.  But I suppose that's the least of their worries these days.
• Took a vacation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for Independence Day.  Hiking in the Grand Tetons was beautiful, and we were even able to squeeze in a trip to Yellowstone National Park to see Old Faithful.
• Also in July, I saw Paul McCartney live for the first time.  It was everything I could have hoped for:  such an amazing musician and song writer, and one of my all time musical heroes.
• In September I had surgery on my right shoulder to correct a genetic bone issue that was pushing me towards a full rotator cuff tear.  If I had known how painful the recovery would be, I might have reconsidered.
• Later that month I did a blog post for my new job talking about the development environment I put together there.
• In October I picked up the new AppleTV.  Pretty cool device, and well priced.  Earlier today, I think I came up with a workaround for the slow movie downloads I was seeing with my setup.  I also picked up my first electric guitar that month.
• The latter part of November brought an awesome trip back to New Zealand for Peggy's sister Kim's wedding.
• December saw the launch of my friend Paul's project, MusixShare, which I helped build for him.  A really interesting idea.

• In the beginning of the year I officially became a manager at Digg, though I still spend a majority of my time there coding.
• In March I became an uncle again with the birth of my brother Mike's first child, Nina Taylor Shupp.
• April 26th I ran my first 10.6 mile race as part of the Big Sur International Marathon.  I finished in around 2 hours 40 minutes.  The course, on CA 1 along the Pacific ocean, has a lot of hills, but is amazingly beautiful.  I hope to do the full marathon next time.
• In early May, Digg launched its Facebook Connect integration.  This was a long project which for which I led the technical implementation.  It went really well, and saw an initial increase in registrations upwards of 50%.  It was also covered on Tech Crunch.
• Later that month I gave an internal "Brown Bag Tech Talk" on OpenID.  The slides are available here.
• In June, Peggy and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary just before heading out for a 16 day vacation in Europe.  We visited Paris, Copenhagen, Lunde, Tallinn, Kiel, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and Stockholm.
• In July, myself and a few colleagues at Digg handed in our contribution to a forthcoming book on PHP unit testing.  The book is a case study on using PHPUnit and continuous integration by Sebastian Bergmann.  It's currently being translated into German, and should be out this year in both German and English.
• Later that month I spoke at OSCAMP 2009 on contributing to the PEAR project (the PHP Extension and Application Repository).  The slides are available here.
• In August, I ran for and was elected to The PEAR Group, the governing body of PEAR.
• That same month, I played drums on a new album with The Whitehalls (formerly Heathrow), a band I've been playing with since shortly after moving up to San Francisco.  The record is almost done, and should be out soon.
• In October I attended my first high school reunion.  It was entertaining, and I really enjoyed seeing a few people, but for the most part it was pretty much exactly what I expected.
• We spent Thanksgiving up in Kohler, WI on lake Michigan where some of Peg's family was gathering.  One highlight of the trip was taking a segway tour of Chicago's waterfront on the way back.
• December 1st I closed down my long running web hosting service, MerchBox, which I started back in 2000.
• Just after that saw the release of Digg's second generation API, another long project which I led initially, and contributed a good amount to.  We also knocked out a fun reference application on a Sunday afternoon to help developers get up and running, which you can see here.
• Also in December, The Whitehalls participated in Silicon Valley Rocks 2009, a benefit for Music in Schools Today that raised $27,000.
• We spent Christmas and New Year's Eve back in northern Virginia, and were able to get in a fair amount of time at the Smithsonian.  I wish I had appreciated it when I lived there.
• Closing out the month saw the acceptance into PEAR of two libraries I wrote, OpenID and Services_Digg2.

Cheers,

Bill Shupp