2016, Such a rollercoaster

By the end of 2015, I was doing some great work at my job and was happy with the way things had been progressing in my career since I decided to make the move from Perth to Melbourne in the middle of 2014. However, 2015 was a "mental gap-year" for me, I had just finished my Computer Science degree the previous year and wanted to take some time to just relax my mind and coast for a while. As the end of the year loomed, I set out some goals for myself and announced to Melbourne Cocoaheads at the December meetup that I wanted to be a bigger part of the Swift and Apple developer community. I honestly had no idea things would turn out the way that they did.

In one of my earlier journal entries, I detailed a list of goals I wanted to achieve and the metrics for which I would base my success off. With the exception of blogging weekly, I'm happy to say that I met all of my goals while I was speaking at my first international conference, try! Swift NYC, in September.

After I came back from New York, I pondered on what 2017's goals would entail and decided to really push myself and host Australia's very own international conference for Swift and Apple developers. The date was set for late February because I didn't want to clash with WWDC, post-WWDC conferences, and our homegrown conference, DevWorld. However, this date only gave me five months to plan, organise and execute the event, which was no simple task because as my advisors forewarned me about, organising a conference is a lot of work.

Although it was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, organising a conference, and working 9 to 5 as a software engineer, the event ran incredibly smoothly, people told me they had an amazing time and learned so much from the speakers. In the coming months, I plan to write about how I soloed the entire organisational aspect of the conference and leveraged the skills of my friends to help me with parts I couldn't do myself. I've always tried to give something back when I'm in a position that allows me to do so, and I hope there's someone out there that will probably find the material helpful enough that they feel encouraged to organise their own conference sometime in the future.

Anyways, that's the year that was and as I get back from my post-conference-holiday in Japan, I'll hopefully have a solid 2017 game plan of goals and ambitions for this year. Big thanks to all those people that supported me in the past year, I couldn't have done this without you.