At that time of the year (almost) everybody make his/her overview of the year. I was postponing my overview of 2014 for a few weeks in a row and I ended up with a draft post only. That was the reason I made a promise to myself that I won’t do the same for 2015, but like you see today it’s the last day of the year and I have only a few headlines and nothing more, so … yeah I managed to publish the post 🙂
Anyway, moving on. So in short twenty fifteen was a fun and a really interesting year both – in professional and personal level. I won’t spend too much time on writing everything down, so here are the highlights of the most interesting things from 2015
DevriX in 2015
DevriX is doing well, we are growing and I believe we are on the right track. In the end of 2014 we sat down and we did a retrospection of the year. We’ve discussed our mistakes, we’ve learned from them and we’ve decided to update and improve our work process, WordPress Website Pricing and our workflow in general. Mario published a really great post – 6 Things We Learned In 2014 As a WordPress Agency where he shared our mistakes and what we’ve decided to update for the next year.
We also did some cool things such as
And, of course, we did our first #dxhax coding hackathon too 🙂
Day 4 of our #dxhax coding hackathon – the latest deploy is over 🙂 w/ @no_fear_inc @xavortm @metodiew pic.twitter.com/5XCrYS6lsA
— DevriX (@wpdevrix) October 14, 2015
I’m thrilled to see what will happen in 2016 and I’m looking forward for the bright future for me and the company.
WordCamps, meetups and WordPress related events
This year I went to the first WordCamp Belgrade and we have an amazing time with the local WordPressers and the community. There supposed to be a blog post about it, but like you can see, this year wasn’t the most active one here 🙂
In short – we have a few really nice days hanging out with great folks, drinking beer and smoking Shisha, talking WordPress and visiting some of the most significant places in Belgrade
https://www.instagram.com/p/1l7PLGQvab/
Mario did a great presentation – Building SaaS With WordPress and things like that 🙂
My first talk at WPBGUG
We are doing WordPress meetups here in Sofia from the end of 2012 and I’m helping to the team for the general organization, website, Facebook group, Meetup.com group and what not, but I’ve never presented there, so it was about a time. I did my first talk there and to be honest, it wasn’t the best talk and in general (the presentation in general), but the content was solid and we had a really nice Q&A and discussion session after the talk.
WordCamp Sofia 2015
After volunteering at WordCamp Sofia 2013 and WordCamp Europe 2014, this year I went to the next step and I became an organizer of WordCamp Sofia 2015. It was a really amazing experience for me, working together with the team of great and dedicated professionals. We’ve worked hard and did everything we can to organize the best possible event and I believe we did a good job. Of course, there are always things that you could do better, but in general it went well.
Here are a few selected photos 🙂
WordPress Theme Review Workshop at init Lab
In the mid of December we did a small workshop in our local hackerspace – init Lab
As usual, the blog post is an only drat (at the moment), but the slides could be found here 🙂
My personal GitHub challenge
This spring I’ve challenged myself and I’ve managed to do 100 consecutive days with at least 1 commit per day. At this point I’m around my 250th day and I’m looking forward to see the desired number – 365 🙂
Contributing back to WordPress
This year I was focused mainly on our client work, but I still managed to make time and contributing back to WordPress. We love Open Source and giving back, so it’s a something natural.
I’m one of the most active members in our Bulgarian WordPress Support forum and I’m answering to people, sharing ideas and moderating the forum.
By the end of the year I became an administrator of our WordPress Bulgaria Facebook group which is the most active place if you want to ask, discuss, share or just want to chat with other local WordPressers. In addition to that from time I’m helping to WordPress.tv team and WordPress Theme Review Theme with moderating videos and reviewing themes, but I’ll try to be more active in 2016 for sure! 🙂
My First WordPress Core patch
I’m contributing back to WordPress from many years with different things, some of them mentioned above, but this year I finally managed to submit my first patch to the core and I became one of the members of the amazing crew of WordPress core contributors. The story was published on WP Tavern.
Stanko Metodiev’s First-time Experience Contributing Patches to WordPress Core
After that I’ve submitted a few more patches to the core and I managed to submit one patch for TwentyFifteen, the new default theme for WordPress 4.4. I’m looking forward next releases and I’ll try to be involved as much as I can in 2016.
Personal
Here you can see some random stories in photos from the year 🙂
Eating, drinking and smoking delicious things
Taking selfies…
And a few more random pictures from this year
A surprise Birthday party for my girl
https://www.instagram.com/p/_ym2FpCeaa/
And much more!
Goals for 2016
It’s not going to be a well-defined list, because I don’t believe in things like “From Monday/next day”, “From the Next Year”, etc, but here are a few of the many things I’d like to do the next year:
- A better work-life balance
- Improving my development and management skills, a better time management and presentation skills
- Going to WordCamps, exploring the beauty of Bulgaria and traveling more in general (shocker, right?:)
- Contributing back to WordPress and Open Source projects even more
- Finished our long-waiting construction thing we’ve started
- … and many more such as read more, having fun even more, do more sport and all the good things I can think of 🙂
I wish more happy and healthy year for all of my friends, colleagues and the family. That’s the most important thing, the rest is a matter of hard-working and dedication (and a bit of luck, of course :))
Happy new year, y’all!
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