written on Sunday, January 20, 2013
I was close to writing my 2012 recollection post in December but the year really did not end until the last minutes of the 31st. It has undoubtedly been the most exciting year for myself.
In November of 2011 Steve Gaffney from Splash Damage sent me a mail out of the blue if I was interested in a Skype call about their new venture. A month and a half later I was working for the Splash Damage offspring Fireteam. The first two months from home, then I relocated to London. I can't stress how much fun that last year with Fireteam has been.
It all turned out massively differently than expected but that was half the fun. While we're technically a separate company but we work very closely together with both Splash Damage and WarChest and share the same office space. Without doubt I have learned more in the last year than in the last four combined because of that. Splash Damage / Fireteam / WarChest is a great environment for that in general because there is such a diverse bunch of people. I think we have people from more than 20 countries (I definitely counted 18) and due to the nature of the company there are different professions working together which gives you a ton of insight into new areas. We're certainly not flawless but so far I am tremendously enjoying the environment.
Splash Damage's first iOS game RAD Soldiers launched properly in December and also promptly got an Apple feature. That definitely kept us all busy during Christmas time since it's using our stuff for the network infrastructure.
Last year I was fortunate to give seven talks in seven different countries next to my work. This also for the first time included a talk outside of my comfort zone at GDC Online which I gave as a stand-in for our CEO Steve Gaffney. I hope to be able to continue doing that next year but I will definitely not increase the number of conferences I'm going to attend — after all I'm doing this next to my work and not as a professional thing.
The last year to a large degree was looking back at what I did before and learning from mistakes. It has not gone unnoticed that I contributed less to my Open Source project over the course of the last year than I did before. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I based all of what I did on Python and my own stuff and never really thought outside of the box. I'm still enjoying using Python and Flask tremendously but I also being more in contact with other things.
Fireteam has a very different approach to system architecture and I believe it's a superior approach than what is currently available in the Python community. I would love to eventually open source that stuff or reimplement a framework based on those principles but I think it's too early for that to happen.
I did however plan on giving some presentations on how our internal structure works so that other people could reimplement it if they like the approach.
I can't express how grateful I am for being in the position I am currently. It blows my mind that there are so many people out there that use my libraries, read my blog and generally seem to be interested in what I'm doing. 2012 marked the year where for the first time I was no longer surprised if I read that some large website was built on Flask. I still can't believe how large that thing has become.
I was incredibly honored to be invited to give keynotes at both the Japanese and South African PyCon. The community we have here is amazing and I hope it stays like that with all the changes it's currently going through.
I know I did less than ideal maintenance for my project last year but that I will improve upon that. I definitely felt bad for being elected as PSF member and not having done much for public Python work last year.
Thanks everybody!