How are you doing?
It has been a while since we chatted, grab a cuppa and make yourself comfy.
How was Christmas?
What do you have planned for next year? I don't mean resolutions, the kind you give up on within a matter of days. What do you seriously hope to achieve in 2013?
What I am aiming to do here is get some goals down on what I want the year ahead to include.
Charity Work
A charity that is very dear to me is Maggie's who offer support to anyone affected by cancer.Having twice participated in their Monster Bike and Hike and completed the Bronze and Silver distances this year my goal is to reach Gold.
Of course a very large part of this is fundraising. Between now and May, my teammate Ross and I will be putting on a number of events to encourage you to dig deep and support Maggie's. The first opportunity for you to do this is to donate on our justgiving page.
Last year to help my team and other teams train for the big event I built GoTeamGo. GoTeamGo politely reminds those of us skilled in procrastination to get off their backside and train according to a canned training schedule. It also shares your progress on Twitter and Facebook. Ideally your followers feel more a part of your training journey and this will encourage them to donate to Maggie's as a result. My goal here is to promote GoTeamGo, get more users and raise more funds for charity.
Building upon the ideals behind GoTeamGo I intend creating a video training blog. My aim here is to show a tubby lad (me incase you think I'm going to be following you) puffing and panting through a number of different activities to demonstrate that if I can do it, so can you. This will also grow into a list of training routes for other (future?) Monster participants. To help drive attention to the blog, and there by the charity, hopefully some celeb athletes will put me through my paces.
If the blog kicks off I would love to finish it off with something a tad on the insane side by biking down some Icelandic Volcanos, as long as they don't interrupt the inbound flight. Actually I'll do the silly thing whether the blog takes off or not!
Aside from the Monster Bike and Hike I want to get better at mountain biking, and somewhat unrelated, get back to Snowboarding.
Tech
Working life is very exciting at the minute.
- We are about to move into Edinburghs Startup Incubator, TechCube.
- Daniel Grieve is joining us in 7 days time!
Further to this I have a number of tech community related goals.
ScotlandJS: @ScotlandJS
In June 2012 I organised the first ScotlandJS in Edinburgh. This achieved all the aims I cobbled together, numerous local and international speaker, over 100 delegates and a great opportunity for like minded developers and designers to get together and share their knowledge.
This in turn spawned GlasgowJS which has been motoring along nicely ever sine. My goal for ScotlandJS is to grow the conference, this needs more thought as to whether to be over 2 days or have more tracks or both? One thing that is for sure is that we will have a NodeCopter event and hopefully raise some money for charity in the process. Wooooo
GlasgowJS RoadTrip: @GlwJS
In February, Dave Kennedy and I will be bringing the GlasgowJS RoadTrip to Edinburgh. Fingers crossed this will help kick start some kind of JS group/meetup in Edinburgh because JavaScript is the future.ScotRUG Glasgow: @ScotRUG
2012 has been a great year for Glasgows Ruby User Group with talks on values, learning and speakers travelling thousands of miles to visit us! Next year my goal is to keep the momentum going with Colin, and tighten up on the organisation.
Lean Agile Glasgow @LeanAgileGLA
Simply put I need to attend more. Due to ScotRUG, GlasgowJS and LAG being at the start of each month a lot of the time I miss out on one. LAG is always a great night, so get yourself along!
Code Retreat
This year I helped out at a Code Retreat, then was incredibly pleased to be invited to facilitate a Retreat in Aberdeen. Having coached a number of teams in TDD and agile methods in the past I was astonished by how powerful and successful the Code Retreat format is.
It was incredible to see the energy in the room during the event.
I have always been terrified of any form of public speaking and the positive feedback has helped give my confidence a much welcomed boost.
I have always been terrified of any form of public speaking and the positive feedback has helped give my confidence a much welcomed boost.
I don't think there is much in the way of a goal for Code Retreat other than to facilitate more and spread the word.
Something New: IslayConf: @islayconf
Along with my partner in crime, Colin Gemmell, we are organising IslayConf. This is going to be an incredible challenge.
Why?
Given the constraints of accommodation it may be a struggle to have more than 30 delegates and speakers. That is 30 total, not 30 delegates and 30 speakers. Tiny, I know.
One thing Code Retreat taught me is that applying constraints to how you do things can get surprising and interesting results. We'll see how the small conference size works out and what I can bring back to ScotlandJS.
For the avoidance of doubt there will be a larger than usual focus for a conference on a certain kind of refreshment.
Summary
Lets see, fundraising, training, more mountain biking, more snowboarding, dog walking, more reading, growing umpteen events and starting a new one and learning more JavaScript and front end skills.
What about you?
Time for another cuppa?
You can find me on Twitter at @jiggy_pete. Come say Hi and let me know what you are doing!
