2009 Year in Review « Bill Shupp

16Jan/100

2009 Year in Review

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while, and since it's the beginning of a new year, I thought I'd start out with a list of highlights from last year. So here's my 2009 Year in Review:

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.