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Revisiting 2014

Business:

  • Attended only four conferences (FOSDEM, Linuxdays Graz, DebConf and Flowcon) due to taking care of my child each Tuesday and Friday (so it wasn’t easy to attend conferences during the week, and weekends are usually family time for me nowadays)
  • Home office/remote work: this year was very remote work and home office focused because I wanted to see my daughter grow up as much as possible and it was totally worth it
  • New company: together with a friend I started a new company called SynPro Solutions, focusing on IT administration for local (as in Graz/Styria/Austria) industry (lesson learned: there’s quite some overhead involved if you’re not doing business alone, but it’s getting better over time and it’s working fine nowadays) [disclaimer: Grml Solutions and Grml-Forensic still exist and are active]

Technology / Open Source:

  • container virtualization docker: worked a lot with it, especially related to integration in Jenkins
  • code review system gerrit: deployed to production at a customer and still manage and support it (in combination with jenkins-debian-glue)
  • Amazon/EC2, GCE & CO: did a bunch of stuff related to auto scaling, automatic deployment and image/AMI generation
  • Ten years of Grml!

Personal:

  • Used the Steiermark-Card to visit many nice places in Styria with my family (Ökopark Almenland is amongst our favorite places for children)
  • Bought myself a Roland TD-30KV drum-kit, allowing me to play drums whenever I want to (which is great if you don’t have to think of your family or neighbors, just use headphones and start rocking!)
  • Started training table tennis in summer with one of my neighbors (who’s a [semi-]professional), playing about weekly/bi-weekly since then and became quite proficient
  • Became styrian academic champion in Badminton, single and double
  • After having a year without that much reading due to new constraints (AKA family time) I managed to start reading on a regular base in the second half of the year, very much enjoyed that :) (though didn’t read as much as I wanted to in Q4 due to lots of work)
  • The year ended with the 2nd birthday of my daughter. I’m so happy and can’t imagine my life without her anymore.

Conclusion: 2014 was a great year for me, both business as personal wise. I would be more than happy if 2015 would be similar to it.

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