2009 Reflection

Of course, the past is history. But once in a while it’s good to look back, which is what I did during a 4 hour train trip yesterday... But then you need to move on to avoid getting stuck in the past... We’ll be moving on in a number of soon to come blog posts, but first, here are a few things I’m actually proud of from last year:

• Established a new home base in Zurich, Switzerland.
• Had a two month mini-sabbatical in February/March.
  
• Quit my job and started my own company (this++) together with my business partner Georg Breithaupt and we actually found customers that rock and we love working for.
• Did my first skydive.
• Had the opportunity to spend some great times with my parents on separate occasions in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
• Had the opportunity to spend some great times with my little brother on separate occasions in the Caribbean, the USA, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. This was quite unique since we live on different continents for a while now.
• Met a number of new amazing people, got to see a lot of my friends in person, and was able to reconnect with others online.
• Learned to SCUBA dive.
• Sailed a regatta on a former America Cup boat.
  
• Won the "2009 World's Best Presentation Contest" on SlideShare in the category "Technology".
  
• Started learning Bulgarian, and had an amazing time in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• Started running on a regular basis.
• Learned tons of new things about .NET, C#, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, MS SQL Server, IIS, and software architecture/development/design in common.
• Wrote my first guest post, which brings me to the fact that ...
  

... it was rather quiet at this blog lately. At one hand because of the amount of work of starting my own company (actually two of them, but more to that in a different post), at the other hand because of I was not sure which direction to go with this blog. I think I figured it out, and will write more about the planned direction of this blog in the next post.