I've only managed to write up my thought on the previous years twice (2009, 2007), but this year was one of, if not the, most important year of my life.
Professional
The most important part of 2010 was in my personal life, but for the sake of remembering (this blog is primarily here because I forget stuff), here's what I got up in my professional life during 2010:
Speaking
I love speaking at conferences and although I had to pull out of a few this year, Flash on the Beach in particular, I had the honour of spreading the good word about HTML5 at a good number of conferences, giving an overview of JavaScript related APIs. As I look around conferences now, I get the distinct feeling that this talk will be redundant or maybe done to death by other speakers, so the plan is that in 2011 is to ditch this talk and try to go in a completely different direction to the other talks we're seeing. Hopefully this is something I can pull off - that's assuming I'm invited to speak again (yes, I'm just as insecure as everyone else!).
I also got to run a number of workshops, including running the jQuery for Designers workshop for the mighty Andy Clarke and his For A Beautiful Web and HTML5 for @media and John Allsopp (equally mighty!). All of them so far have been a hit with the delegates, which leaves me chuffed to bits, and has encouraged me to run a special workshop project in 2011 - but more on that later.
Projects
The biggest (new) project was Introducing HTML5 with Bruce Lawson. What an honour to be asked to co-author the book with Bruce. It was a really good experience (although there were definitely some struggles with the editors ::grrr::) and all in all I'm actually rather proud of the book we put together. When I ask around November time, we had sold a "respectable" number of books so far.
Then there was Full Frontal 2010. The first Full Frontal was such a big success, I was rather worried that this one would be extremely difficult to equal last years. Turns out: we did just fine. The conference was a huge success again, and again, that's no doubt down to the speakers and Julie's smooth running of the event. It's definitely happening again in 2011 - I just have to find seven more awesome speakers!
Left Logic, my business, has also been doing well. This year I've done business with the likes of the BBC and Google - both of which are respectable clients, along with a fistful of other equally respectable clients. Right towards the end of the year I was asked to work on a couple of really exciting small projects. One I'm now sure won't make the light of day (sadly) the other should go live very early in the new year. No doubt I'll tweet about it come release day.
Finally, I started working on a(nother) personal project called: Förbind. It's a real-time sockets service designed to make adding real-time easy as pie to your application. It's still very early days yet, but what's exciting to me, aside from the socket side, is the fact the entire application is written in JavaScript on top of Node. Something to keep my skills sharpened.
Personal
Little Tia Sharp
This year was all about Tia for me. Julie fell pregnant at the end of 2009, and 2010 we watched together as our lives prepared to change. Except in the last moments, Tia was lost.
She was born on 31st August 2010, we're both still grieving her loss now 4 months later - and I fully expect we will do for a long time to come. Each day comes with its own highs and lows and I'm seeing life through very different eyes than I did only a short while ago.
I'm thankful for small mercies and even more so that Julie and I have remained strong together even in light of everything that's happened. I question all the time how people can wander around so oblivious of life, and how incredible fragile it all is. Equally I know that we can't spend our lives focusing on this, and that we need to move forward through life. Like I said, I'm seeing things differently lately.
Slowly in the last month or so, some kind of new normality has begun. We've been able to leave our fortress (we spent a long time hiding at home in the early months), I've started to resume some work and we even occasionally laugh nowadays.
I have to also say thank you to everyone who has listened and let us talk about our baby girl. The warmth and well wishes from family, friends and strangers alike has been overwhelming and it's given me a real belief that people are ultimately kind and loving. Something that's hard to notice in the normal day to day grind. I'm truly thankful and honoured that we have been in your thoughts. If I could hug you, I would be right now.
Without turning this in to a monster post about my views on life and death, I'm still super proud of Julie and my little Tia. I'm still a proud father, even if I don't have Tia in the house, and I've promised myself that I'll be a better man in her name.
For me, 2010 will always be Tia's year.
