A Year In Review

It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.

Sadly, I am a poor diarist, so if I've missed off something important to you - sorry! It has been a year of great change. A new house, new jobs for us both, new countries visited, and many books read.

November 2018

Carol's blog about Hackference Brum

In the funniest session of the day, Terence Eden told us about his involvement with the W3C and collaborating on the HTML spec. He’s a very engaging speaker, and his talk encouraged me to open a teeny tiny PR on the html spec!

My very clever wife wangled us an invitation to dinner at Lincoln College, Oxford. Unbeknownst to us, we were sat at high table! Cue all the students standing to welcome us in, a Latin recitation, and a rather agreeable dinner. Such a bizarre evening surrounded by all the pomp and circumstance - but utterly delightful!

December 2018

Twitter Bug Bounty of $3,000! I was awarded this in November, but wasn't allowed to speak about it until December.
Celebrated with a holiday in Lanzarote

January 2019

My Great-Aunt Sonia died. She was a ripe old age and had been the lynch-pin in our family. The last remaining member of the clan-of-aunts.
Started a terrifying new job

February 2019

Had some fun working with the gang at Twitter in order to secure a 4-letter username.

Launching stuff is fun!

After watching Marie Kondo, we engaged on a spring clean of our possessions. In truth, these Babylon 5 books did bring me joy - but lugging them between homes did not.

Ultimately, sharing that joy with someone else is also a pretty good feeling.

March 2019

My wonderful wife won a place on a prestigious training course in Barcelona. Naturally I volunteered to accompany her! I'd not been to Barcelona since I worked Mobile World Congress.

April 2019

Gave up the running of Dabr.

I'd been running Dabr for a decade. Someone offered to take it on, then dropped out. That was annoying.

May 2019

Started going to meetings about AMP. Still not a fan.

My SVG talk got rolled out a couple of times - I was pleased with how this one went.

June 2019

Invited to a conference in Denmark. The plane ride and hotel were... not good. Hard to complain when someone else is paying. But I need to learn to check travel details more thoroughly when someone else is arranging them. That said, food was great!

I've also been doing some work with the friendly folk in Cheltenham. The locals seemed to like my talk on device security.

July 2019

I gave blood! A long time resolution which I've never quite fulfilled. It was quick, relatively painless, and I got some free biscuits. I've another donation coming up shortly.

And the SVG talk again!

August 2019

Bought a new house! Stressful and expensive. But very worth it. Why have we moved? My awesome wife just got a brand new job at UCL. She is very clever. And it means I don't need to commute from Oxford to London each day.

At the end of the month, we visited Hong Kong. We'd booked a year ago, before the protests. Everything was fine. The weather was the most extreme thing about it. Lots of lovely veggie food, and some excellent sight-seeing.

September 2019

Most of the month was taken up with our Big Australia Road Trip Adventure. Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. Lots of adventures, lots of family, lots of beer, lots of walking, lots of food. Exhausting and refreshing.

October 2019

Mostly homemaking. Drilling holes and redecorating. Settling into a new neighbourhood and routine is always exhausting. We generally move house every 5 years - but we were in our last place for 6. I don't know how often we'll move in the future. We're extremely fortunate not to have kids - but even just uprooting ourselves is mentally taxing. Is this our forever-home? Probably not - but I hope we'll be here a while.

We took OpenBenches to OggCam to discuss open culture. We got so much lovely feedback - including this gem: