I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘crazy’ past 6 months, but life has ramped up a bit and, as usual, I haven’t bothered to write about any of it in this space. It’s probably for the best.

Here are a couple of exciting things that have occurred since the last time I wrote:

1. I got a new job! On November 3rd, I joined the development team over at Westwerk, where I’ve been taking all of the things I’ve learned about WordPress and have been applying them to myriad customization projects for clients big and small. It’s been great being back in a larger office after several years of working for companies with just a handful of employees. We have 19! When I haven’t been working on development projects, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to brush up on my foosball and Super Smash Bros. skills, both of which have been collecting rust for years. One of these days, I may become a feared opponent, but more importantly, I hope to be viewed as a go-to employee and someone who’s able to solve any challenging problem that can be thrown at him.

2. My new band played some shows! And we recorded a demo this summer! We’ve been quiet these past few months while Zabby learns what it’s like to be a dad for the first time, but the whole gang’s been back in the rehearsal space for the last couple of weeks, so perhaps we’ll find ourselves on a stage again before long this winter.

3. Since sometime around mid-May, I’ve been helping Jonathan Sundquist organize the annual Midwest PHP Conference, and this morning we just began sending out acceptance letters to our panel of speakers. As with previous years, the conference will be a two-day event, and this year we’ve accepted 32 talks on a variety of topics (from a collection of 331 submissions!). The website will be updated very soon with information about the talks we selected and the speakers who will be giving them, and registration is now open. It’s been a long road thus far and there’s still much to do, but it will be March before long and I’m looking forward to catching as many presentations as I can during those two days.

In addition to the items above, I’ve been keeping busy with some freelance work, catching a show here and there, and planning out some ways to be better about setting and achieving goals in the new year. I’ve been so focused on my weekly routine of activities that I’ve let some other important goals slip by the wayside, and I’m looking forward to sitting down and figuring out how to broaden my horizons in the new year. Hopefully, I’ll get to enjoy a little traveling, do some cycling, join a bowling league, and catch up on all of the reading I’ve been putting off in 2014. Nothing is more satisfying than going through your list of goals from January and seeing just how many you’ve accomplished, and unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll get much satisfaction from reviewing that list this year. That said, I’ve been working on some things that will help put me in a better position for the new year, and I’m really excited about all of the potential 2015 has in store. Keeping my fingers crossed for big things!

Man, how time flies – I can’t believe it’s May again already! I can’t pretend like I’m going to get around to blogging regularly again, but I’ve been keeping busy so it seems like a good time for an update.

Readers who are seeing this on the actual site itself will notice that I did a relaunch of sorts last weekend. I’ve been toying around with Javascript and non-Javascript based navigation, interactions, and presentation, and although the site has a long way to go before it’s at the point where I’m feeling good about it (and where it covers JS and non-JS use cases), I felt it was far enough along that I wanted to get it out into the world. There’s still much to do, but at least there’s a base now. Many thanks to Abby Haddican for designing the transparent monogram at the top of the page.

Speaking of Abby, I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with her on a couple of web projects recently, one on a freelance basis (her own portfolio site linked above) and another for the design agency where she did an internship last summer, Werner Design Werks, as part of my full-time work at Room 34. Abby’s clean, minimalist designs make it a joy to put these sites together, and I feel pretty proud about how both of them have turned out. While there remains as much to learn as ever about web design and development, I feel as though my skills have improved immensely in actual, measurable ways over the last year of doing this full-time. I can’t wait to see what the next year will bring.

In non work-related news, the band I’ve been playing with since February 2013 has finally come up with a name – Loud Nerves – and we’ve even booked a show! Our debut performance will be on Wednesday, June 18th at Stevens Square in Minneapolis as part of the Cinema & Civics series that happens there every year. We’ll have the esteemed honor of opening for the 1990 classic movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m looking forward to it! There’s also talk that we’ll be doing some recording soon, so I’ll have actual music to share with others for the first time in quite awhile.

That’s it in terms of major announcements right now. More soon.

Well, folks, it’s Christmas. It’s been almost 5 months since I’ve written anything proper in this space, but with 2014 just around the corner, now seems to be as good of a time as any for me to jot down a few notes and reflect on the past year. Let’s step into the Wayback Machine, shall we?

Goals

Each year, I put together a list of goals for myself. Individually, I deem them all to be reasonable and attainable, but often, the list itself is so cumbersome and unwieldy that there’s just no way I’ll accomplish it all. Here’s my checklist for 2013:

• Finish my Associate of Applied Science degree at SPC
  • Do my best to finish with a 4.0 (It seemed uncertain at times, but I managed to pull this off!)
• Land a sweet web development job (I’m so proud to work for Room 34, and I can’t wait to see the assortment of problems we get to help solve in 2014)
• Participate in two professional conferences (I went to one – MidwestPHP in March)
• Read 35 books (I’m at 39 as of this writing – hoping to check off #40 before next Tuesday)
• Go to the gym 12 times in all 12 months
• Redesign my personal website (There’s still more to be done on that front, but hey, it does look different than last December!)
• Develop and build a message board application
• Redesign and build the bowling league administration application I started in college
• Design and launch a collaborative creative writing website
• Write a short story
• Do at least one set of stand up comedy

• Start a new band (No shows yet [and no name, to boot], but it’s been a blast getting together to play with this set of awesome dudes)

• Learn six songs on guitar
• Make three pieces of art (illustrations) (Many thanks to my pal Matt and his recommendation for the excellent iPad app, Procreate. I’m planning on making this part of my regular routine in the coming year)
• Learn to use PhotoShop and Illustrator (Illustrator, you’re next!)
• Finish motorcycle repairs and ride!
• Ride my bicycle once a week
• Take a vacation! (I had the pleasure of spending three fun-filled days in NYC with the lovely Abby in November, our first real trip together)

Clearly, I set out to accomplish more than I actually achieved, but I feel pretty good about the progress I’ve made in the last year! There’s still work to be done, and that’s the fun with goals.

Many things happened that weren’t on the list: I’ve had the privilege of tutoring my friend Phil in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and we’ve been getting together frequently since March. I’ve begun taking lessons in Spanish (via the very fun and excellent Duolingo.com), and am hoping to become proficient in 2014. I’ve learned how to build websites in WordPress and Shopify. I’ve taught myself to use SCSS, Git, and the Linux command line, and took a real-life crash course in learning Responsive Web Design techniques. I’ve continued to study Object-Oriented Programming, and hope to improve upon my existing skill set in the next year. I’ve begun getting together with a mentor to assist with improving those skills.

There is much I want to accomplish in the next year, and some of the goals I set for this past year will likely roll over. I still want to get back on my motorcycle, and I want to begin writing more regularly again. It’ll be great to revisit my list next year – it’s certain that I’ll have learned much by then, and I’m looking forward to seeing just how far I’ve come in another 12 months time.

Projects

Through my work at Room 34, I got to build a ton of great websites this year. Here’s a small sampling of projects I had the pleasure of working on:

• Paperista (fully customized WordPress theme based on client’s designs)
• Brown Ink (integrated a Shopify store-front into the Room 34-developed WordPress site)
• JM Gordon Lighting (customized WordPress theme)
• Architecture Field Office (customized WordPress theme)
• Pier Five Hundred (customized WordPress theme)

Room 34 develops responsive websites for all of our clients by default, so every one of these is set up to work well on mobile devices as well as tablets and desktop/laptop environments. It’s been an absolute joy working on client sites this year, and I’m very much looking forward to building on the experiences I’ve had this year in my future client work.

In addition to my full-time work, in 2014, I’m planning to spend more time working on a few personal projects, some of which were outlined as unaccomplished goals for 2013. I’ve been tinkering around on CodePen a bit lately, and it’s a great tool to work on small front-end projects and quickly lay down some ideas to refer to later. In addition, I’m planning on putting up code for my personal projects on GitHub in the coming year so that I can make better use of that collaborative resource.

It’s really been an amazing year, and looking back to reflect on all this helps me better understand just how far I’ve come. I’m looking forward to learning even more in 2014.

I’m hoping that the few of you who are subscribers to this blog will see this entry. I’m in the process making additional visual tweaks, moving things around, and slowly incorporating some of the old content I have back into the site (for instance, my lackluster poetry is back online. Hooray!). If I just broke all of the RSS links, I’m very sorry – I promise I’ll get it figured out.

The last couple of months have been great. I finally launched my first couple of sites at work. Nothing has been easy yet, but I’ve learned a lot from each one, with one still-unfinished site provided the bulk of food for thought. I’ve been mentally compiling a list of issues I’ve had to tackle for the first time. Here are a few: creating a drop-down menu populated with featured images from top-level sections, building a custom navigation menu for phone layouts, developing mechanisms for interacting with slideshows in different ways, modifying the WordPress Walker class, creating custom social media buttons to share content, making “back to home” links in different header files within the same site redirect to the correct pages, developing custom contact forms, handling browser inconsistencies – particularly within Internet Explorer (obviously important, but not something I’d done a lot of in the past)…the list quite frankly goes on and on.

It’s been a lot of fun figuring out how to tackle these various problems, and I admit it’s made it challenging to find the motivation to do more of it when I get home on the evenings and weekends (hence, the slow process on getting stuff up on this here site). Still, in my free time I’ve been doing a lot of research and reading up on various web development topics of interest. I started both Git and Sass earlier this year and am getting better and better at using them every day. I’ve been reading The Linux Command Line by William Shotts to build on what I learned in my college networking class. I’m just about done reading Professional WordPress: Design and Development by Brad Williams, and I’ve learned several useful things that should help my future projects at work go more smoothly. I want to learn how to write some client-side applications using AngularJS, and I’m looking to get back into working on my message board and bowling league administration projects, as I want to refactor their codebases to make them object-oriented (and to make them great applications that people would want to use!).

This is just a long way of saying that I’ve been very busy and I’m loving every minute of it. I wish there was more time in the day, or that I had more energy during the week, or both, because there’s so much that I want to know NOW that is just going to take time to learn. Heck, at this point, I haven’t even put anything up on GitHub or helped anyone out with the things I do know on StackOverflow or Reddit, and that’s something that needs to get done, too. I can’t wait to look back on this time in a couple of years just to see how far I’ve come, because it’s been a wonderful journey thus far.

At some point, I’m just going to have to accept that blogging is not my forte. Or, that it’s an infrequently-done activity ’round these parts. For now, though, I’m reveling in this fact: I have fulfilled the requirements for my Associate of Applied Science in Computer Programming degree and have graduated this week from St. Paul College. Next week, I become a full-time web developer over at Room 34.

Life is good, and I’m reading a lot of books. In fact, I’d been working on another blog entry about that which never came to fruition, so I’ll just mention it here. Last year, I participated in the Goodreads reading challenge and surpassed my goal of reading 24 books in 12 months (I read 28). This year, I upped the ante a little bit and am aiming to read 35 books. With 7 1/2 months still left to go in the year, I’ve finished 19 books, and I’ll likely be at 21 or 22 by the end of the month. Some have told me it’s time to up my goal, but I say what’s the point of setting reasonable goals if you can’t complete shatter them? I’m not threatening to double my book count, but hey, who knows how the rest of this year will go now that part of my free time doesn’t have to be dedicated to higher education?

If you’re curious what I’ve been reading (or what’s slated to be read), you can head on over to http://www.goodreads.com/jmichaelward. So far this year it’s been a pretty mixed bag of programming and web design books crossed with some fiction novels and an occasional memoir or non-fiction work. At some point, I’m planning on digging into the Goodreads API to hopefully integrate my reading list onto this site. There are other things I need to take care of first, though, such as updating the home page (since hey! I’m not a student any more!) and fleshing out the rest of the content to better reflect what I’ve been up to.

Tomorrow, however, I’ll be digging my bike out of the basement, because it hasn’t seen daylight since two summers ago.

Here’s to new beginnings.