End of year review 2014

This year has been one of disruption on the home front, but in a positive way. We decided to replace the main bathroom in the first half of the year but that was really just a taster for the main project of building an extension onto the back of the house. Where we had a small kitchen and a dining room that we didn’t really use very much, now we have a large kitchen diner family room that we spend the majority of our time in. It was the first time I’d tried to do a project of this scale and for the most part it was remarkably smooth. Though we were so glad when, in November after three months of work, we finally got rid of the building team. But having just done our first Christmas in the new room, we really couldn’t be happier with the changes. 


The new room after 4 months of work

The new room after 4 months of work

It did mean that there wasn’t as much time for other things as I would have liked. I realised a couple of weeks ago that I only took two weeks off work for the year, this is not enough, and will be resolved in 2015!

That being said, I worked far more from home than previously so I got to spend much more time with the family. I’m really incredibly lucky to be able to wander downstairs from work at 5:30 and spend a couple of hours with the toddler before she goes to bed of an evening. Unbelievably she is already 2.5 years old. 

On the work front 2014 has seen significant change. Domino work has become much more limited in its scope and volume. But it’s given us the opportunity to do something that we’ve been wittering about for a long time. Earlier in the year we (that is Ben, Mark, Julian and myself) started coding a new tool that has become LDC Via. This involved learning new technology stacks in the form of node.js and MongoDB. It’s been a long time since I learned so much in such a short period of time but we’ve finally reached the point where we have a product that we’re happy to share with our beta program members. You’ll hear a lot more about our offering over the next few months. 

I still do Domino work when the opportunity arises but I think at this point I’d consider myself a node.js / MongoDB developer. It’s something that was always going to happen, it just happened a little sooner than I had anticipated. 

So 2015 is going to be an exciting one: we have some big changes coming on the home front in a couple of months and at the same time I need to be rolling out a new product and continuing to develop it.

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