My Year
I first want to share a few things that stood out this year.
In March, I won third place and a free iPad in the DB2’s Got Talent show. I highly recommend participating – great way to hone your presentation skills and to get your name out there in the DB2 community. The 2014 show is looking for applications.
In May, I gave my first IDUG presentation. Had a bit of a crummy time slot as the first presentation on Thursday, but it went pretty well.
I was named as an IBM Champion in Information Management for 2013!
In September, I published my second developerWorks article.
In September, I spoke for three users’ groups in the mid-west. I learned a lot, worked hard, and made some new friends.
In November, I attended IBM Information On Demand for the first time. I had a blast, made contacts, achieved certifications, and of course learned a lot. I have been full of ideas for blog entries ever since.
Lost a good DBA friend. Miss you, Adam.
DB2 Highlights
The big DB2 news of the year, was, of course, the release of DB2 10.5. Much like 10.1, many of the marketing messages were focused on analytics workloads instead of OLTP/e-commerce workloads, but there are some good gems in there. 10.5 was announced in April/May and released in June.
Specific to WebSphere Commerce and DB2, in November DB2 10.1 and 10.5 PureScale were approved for use with WebSphere Commerce 7, Fix Pack 7 and higher.
Blog Numbers
Numbers include guest blogs unless otherwise stated.
I should just about double last year’s page views this year. That means I’ve had over 100,000 page views in a single year! WOW!
I published over 86,000 words this year.
I missed posting for a week twice this year – once in April and once in November – both near conferences, interestingly enough.
I posted 110 posts this year, thus averaging a bit more than two per week.
I received more than 220 non-spam comments this year!
I published the work of two guest bloggers this year – Ian Bjorhovde and Mike Krafick.
I significantly changed the design of my blog in the early summer.
Looking Forward to 2014
I really look forward to getting my hands into 10.1 and hopefully 10.5 also in 2014. It was just in December that I installed 10.1 for the first time, so I’m tweaking my scripts for it and learning all kinds of good stuff that I’ll be sharing.
I keep hoping that I can get a client on PureScale – I really want to try it. Might happen.
I hope that I can get a client that I’ll be supporting to buy DBI’s Brother-Panther for me to work with. I think it’ll improve my productivity and help me with some of the “experiments” that I like to do to check things out.
I really enjoy speaking. I have at least one (joint) presentation approved for IDUG in Phoenix in May, and may submit one for IBM Insight(new name for IOD) in October. Think I could find funding to go speak at IDUG EMEA? I’d really like to be there.
How was your 2013? What interesting plans do you have for 2014?
Hi Ember – *my* 2014 has not yet been, so I can’t answer your question 😉
2013 was… how to put it… “trying”, perhaps? But there definitely good moments there, including attending your presentation at the WDUG meeting in September. It is definitely refreshing and stimulating to learn new things.
Here is hoping for a spectacular 2014!
[…] tune of hundreds of hours. I won’t go through last year again, but you can read about it in my year end blog entry. Unless I want to add a “navel gazing” category for posts, I have to be careful about […]