2008 Retrospective
2008 has certainly been an interesting year. It’s all too easy to fixate on the bad when looking back over this particular 12 months of our collective experience. Goodness knows that the American mass-market media can think of little else other than the bad. And they’ve had a lot of raw material from which to ply their mostly-negative trade: a failed war in Iraq, an acrimonious presidential campaign, global warming, international violence (Russia v Georgia, Israel v Hezbollah, Israel v Hamas, India v Pakastan-based Terrorists, etc.), human rights violations committed by nation states including our own, world-wide inflation of food and energy prices, and a historic failure of the international credit markets that has cascaded into business failures, higher unemployment, and a reduction in aggregate consumption.
From my perspective though, 2008 wasn’t all bad, and I’m spending most of my time today reflecting on all that was good over the past 12 months.
- Chloe, my daughter, was born.
- Obama was elected President.
- My company is still growing like crazy, launched a bunch of great new products, scaled our serving infrastructure to handle xxx% year-over-year traffic growth, and hired a bunch of awesome engineers. We’re still hiring. Contact me at kevin@admob.com if you’re on the market.
- iPhone 3G and the iPhone app store launched, followed by a vibrant, new mobile apps ecosystem.
- Django 1.0 and Python 3.0 released. w00t.
- I now know what a credit default swap and collateralized debt obligations are. So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.
- Saw lots of cool movies this summer with my wife while she was pregnant. I have to confess that Kung Fu Panda was my favorite.
- Did more cooking in 2008 than 2007.
- Spent more time with family and old friends in 2008 than in 2007.
- Peter Hamilton’s The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void came out in 2008.
- Despite insane work schedule and new baby, I wrote more spare-time code this year than usual. Some of this stuff might actually be useful and I plan on opening and releasing a few things in the next month or so. Bonus: as part of my wee-hours hacking, I finally wrote some code that uses AWS.
In general, 2008 was just a happier and more productive year for me than 2007. And despite all the doomsayers predicting economic and geo-political apocalypse in 2009, I’m going to try my damnedest to make my ‘09 even happier and more productive than my ‘08.