jessenoller.com

Yup; it’s that time — every­one and their brother is doing a post look­ing back at 2011 and tak­ing stock of the good, the bad and the ugly. I’m no dif­fer­ent — 2011 was a year that largely rep­re­sented a mas­sive shift in my life’s tec­tonic plates.

I’ve decided to break this reflec­tion into two related parts — the more per­sonal stuff (this one) and the big-P Python stuff — both have seen shifts and changes worth not­ing, and both are inex­tri­ca­bly tied for me. I’ve inten­tion­ally skipped all of the Python** stuff (includ­ing PyCon) that I’ve been work­ing on — that’s going to come next.

Per­sonal Changes

In late 2010 I was play­ing paint­ball — some­thing which every­one should try at least once — it truly is a blast. How­ever, at the time I was grossly over­weight (280/285 lbs head­ing to 300) and run­ning around out­doors with 20+ lbs of equip­ment. It was a nor­mal Sun­day game when I piv­oted in the per­fectly wrong way — my foot had got­ten stuck in some tree roots and when I piv­oted, my right knee dis­lo­cated and I col­lapsed face-first into a pile of tree branches.

I did not real­ize that my knee has dis­lo­cated, just that my leg wasn’t work­ing. I slapped my knee, hard, bent it and got up and kept play­ing. The adren­a­line kept me going for sev­eral more hours while I con­tin­ued to play on a knee of ques­tion­able verac­ity. When I got to my car a few hours later, all I knew is that my knee felt funny, and my cargo pants where tight where my knee was.

When I got home and changed, the truth came out. My knee had swollen to the size of a can­taloupe and turned sev­eral ugly col­ors. I fig­ured I has injured it, and largely ignored it. Then the pain set in the next day.

Fast for­ward through many doc­tor appoint­ments, MRIs, and two more dis­lo­ca­tions — once get­ting my daugh­ter out of the bath­tub which required my wife to come in and put my knee back into place because I was busy cry­ing on the floor, and the sec­ond just get­ting out of bed. My knee, from that ini­tial dis­lo­ca­tion had become very weak. The doc­tor told me flat out that I needed phys­i­cal ther­apy and rehab, oth­er­wise surgery was going to be required.

He told me I needed to change things. Look­ing at myself in the mir­ror, I real­ized that some­thing had to be done — I was stressed, over­weight and my path was out of whack. I couldn’t deal with surgery with three year old and a now preg­nant wife. I got a cor­ti­sone shot and went up the street to the local Bikram Yoga stu­dio — I had never done yoga before — I walked in, slapped down some money and went into a 120 degree studio.

This is a photo of my from June 2010:

 

I became a Bikram con­vert over night — the owner of the local stu­dio Bob is an amaz­ing man, friendly, kind — all of the instruc­tors helped me through learn­ing and grow­ing and push­ing through the pain, the heat and every­thing that comes with a grossly over­weight ex-smoker who was drink­ing 2+ pots of cof­fee a day jump­ing in head first. I quickly ramped to doing classes 3 times a week.

Addi­tion­ally, I com­pletely altered my diet — I’ve long dab­bled in low-carb/no-carb/ketogenic, but this time I jumped in no-holds barred. No sugar, I cut my cof­fee intake to one cup a day, no carbs/gluten, period. 2011 came quickly, and I kept it up. Yoga, diet — lather, rinse and repeat. I shed enough weight that peo­ple at PyCon 2011 didn’t rec­og­nize me. Good. Not good enough. Through­out 2011 I kept this up — drop­ping from an easy 280 lbs to 165 at my low­est. Later in the year I added weight lift­ing with cowork­ers at lunch — even later I started the couch to 5k pro­gram to start run­ning (even doing it the “bare­foot” way).

Now, as the year turns, I weigh a healthy 175 lbs — I’ve put on mus­cle mass, kept my flex­i­bil­ity, kept on my diet which has shifted into a more Paleo form than what it had been (mainly adding fruit back in, but still skip­ping carbs/gluten/sugar — I still mostly only eat meat and veg­eta­bles). I can now run for 30 min­utes with­out feel­ing like death and hit 4.2 miles. My knee still both­ers me some­times, but I’ve dodged surgery. I can now look at my daugh­ters and wife and hope that I’ll be around a lot longer than I would have been had I not done these things. I feel more alive than ever before.

Me, Decem­ber 2011:

 

Dur­ing 2011, I also switched to an all stand­ing desk setup (yup, despite the knee):

• “Switch­ing to a Stand­ing Desk”
• “The stand­ing desk exper­i­ment — 5 months in”

I’m happy to say that this con­tin­ues — thanks to an excel­lent gift from my wife, I even have a nice stand­ing setup at home now. It’s been over 7 months since I last sat down at work to work. Sure, I sit at lunch, and in the car — I’m not that weird, but I con­tinue to reap the ben­e­fits I out­lined in those posts.

I also started work­ing on my men­tal health, and focus. Try­ing to learn how to med­i­tate, work­ing on min­i­miz­ing dis­trac­tions and build­ing small improve­ments to my work­flow. Focus­ing on being open to change and crit­i­cism. Focus­ing on things I had ignored for a long time.

You can’t go and just fix your phys­i­cal self — you have to take care of the men­tal aspects as well. I’ve had to learn this over and over the hard way, and it is still a daily fight between what I was, and what I want to me. I have to focus on small changes and improve­ments con­stantly — oth­er­wise it’s deadly sim­ple to fall back on old ways.

I did a post some time ago — “On Fam­ily, Crank­ing and Chang­ing” — I still read this once in awhile to remind myself where I need to go and what I need to accom­plish. I can’t lose sight.

Now for the hard part.

Chil­dren

2011 also brought my fam­ily to the brink — and I mean that in the lit­eral sense. There was a time where my wife and I would look at each other hope­lessly, won­der­ing what we would do and how we would pull through. In June, we had our sec­ond daugh­ter Addi­son Joy. The preg­nancy was really rough and my cowork­ers and boss sup­ported me through the needed “dis­ap­pear­ing”. My wife spent a lot of time in the hos­pi­tal, and there were many times where we were wor­ried that things wouldn’t work out.

Luck­ily, my wife — and Addi­son, pulled through. I don’t know how they did it, and I sus­pect we’ve burnt a life­time of karma and luck in just a few months, but they both came through. Addi­son was born, and I once again new the joys and pains of hav­ing a new born daugh­ter. Through­out all of this, our old­est daugh­ter Abi­gail trooped on through — it was a lot to ask for a 3/4 year old, but she con­tin­u­ally amazed me. To look at her face and see how much she wor­ships and loves her mother — to see how she loves Addi­son — that’s to know some­thing you’ll never see any­where else.

Not every­thing was well — and we didn’t know it yet, but the worst storm was yet to come.

To quote my post — “Thank you — the impos­si­bil­ity of “It’s going to be OK””:

But, so, AJ was born — and at first, every­thing seemed to be fine. 10 fin­gers, 10 toes and poop­ing — that’s sort of what you hope for in a new­born. We took her home, she saw her pedi­a­tri­cian, and that was that.

Well, no. Around the time Addi­son was three weeks old (shortly before my first child’s birth­day) my wife Dusty started notic­ing that Addi­son was behav­ing erratically/oddly — and if you have any expe­ri­ence with infants, you’d know how hard it is to actu­ally deter­mine “odd” behav­ior. Almost every­thing they do is odd, down to tim­ing exactly the worst moment when to spit up on you (point of fact — it is after you’ve show­ered, and are walk­ing out the door).

In this case, the odd behav­ior my wife noticed was actu­ally a pat­tern — and that’s when you need to worry. You want con­sis­tency in cer­tain areas, you want to see con­tin­ual improve­ment, you want them to con­sis­tently eat, poop and sleep. How­ever, a pat­tern of odd move­ments tipped my wife (who is a fan­tas­tic ana­lyst) off that some­thing was not quite right.

What my wife found was that Addi­son for peri­ods of time any­where from 1–2 min­utes her eyes would slit and roll back and she would freeze up. The best way to describe it is it was almost as if she would just “check out” — as if some­one hit a power switch.

It’s still hard for me to read that post — it’s dif­fi­cult for me to com­mu­ni­cate the emo­tions — the fear, the out­right ter­ror of not know­ing what was wrong with our baby girl. More hos­pi­tals, more doc­tors. My new born daugh­ter with a hel­met of leads and elec­trodes com­ing off of her head. Sleep­ing in cots in hos­pi­tal rooms. My wife elo­quently wrote a series of posts:

• “Wel­come AJ”
• “One of Many Hard Days”
• “The Diag­no­sis and mov­ing for­ward”
• “Updates”
• “God, Are you there?”
• “I make her smile”

Some­thing I say in that thank you post is some­thing that will stick in my mind for­ever. When my friends and peo­ple I barely knew in the Python com­mu­nity heard and saw what we were going through as a fam­ily, the sup­port we got was floor­ing. It still makes me tear up think­ing of all the cards, well wishes and other things — a lit­tle toy for Abi­gail, Doug Napoleone com­ing over to help me out with some­thing, every­thing that the Python com­mu­nity did for our fam­ily. It is, and was amaz­ing. I can never thank all of you enough for what you did for us, and how you helped us pull through.

The num­ber of emails I got from other par­ents in the com­mu­nity who suf­fered through things like this, the well wishes — I, I can’t even go into every­thing that hap­pened. Words can not express it. All I can say is that many times, my wife and I found our­selves in tears, cry­ing with one another because of some act or gift or email from some­one in the community.

In Octo­ber, I did a quick Google+ post, pro­vid­ing an update on how things had panned out — quot­ing that post:

Addison’s diag­no­sis — if you want to call it that — is Cere­bral Palsy — Hyper­to­nia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertonia). This means that she does have a dis­or­der, but it’s not one treated with drugs — just phys­i­cal ther­apy and fre­quent check­ups. We have a nurse and a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist who come weekly and check on her thanks to early inter­ven­tion. She’s devel­op­ing well — she’s eat­ing baby food, smil­ing and gen­er­ally being a nor­mal baby. All we have to do is keep up with the ther­apy and in the­ory her brain will “auto cor­rect” as time goes on. She’s 17lbs and count­ing at just about 5 months and just giv­ing hints of crawling.

In addi­tion to the hyper­to­nia, she was diag­nosed with non epilep­tic seizures — again, not some­thing we can do much about other than to love her, keep up with check­ups and wait.

So that’s where we are — we have a happy, coo­ing, laugh­ing, happy baby and just have to keep a close eye on her and work through things that come up. It’s too early to tell if her prob­lems will have long term con­se­quences. The doc­tors all hope that she’s “error cor­rect” around these things and she’ll be OK. But we won’t know until we see her devel­op­ment at 6 months, 9 months and 1 year — we still have that “threat” that some­thing could hap­pen — her brain could stop devel­op­ing, or con­di­tions could get worse.

But its hard to think about that — because I don’t see the prob­lems — every day, I pick up and hold and play with a beau­ti­ful, cheer­ful baby who wants noth­ing more than to chew on my fin­gers (she’s teething) and laugh. I don’t think about the future much, because it’s unknow­able, and we’ll cross that bridge when it comes. Some­times it pops into my head — that worry, that doubt, and I push it to the side and think of what we’ve already gone through.

It’s now Decem­ber — almost Jan­u­ary. Addi­son has con­tin­ued to thrive — the fear and the worry aren’t for­got­ten — we have reg­u­lar vis­its from a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist and nurse to con­tin­u­ally check on her. She still has some issues we con­tinue to work through, and we’ve got a series of appoint­ments with neu­rol­ogy spe­cial­ists, but its hard to think that any­thing is “wrong” with her at all.

She’s almost 20lbs (huge baby!) — she’s bab­bling, she’s got­ten her first tooth (on christ­mas eve to boot) — she loves her walker and wor­ships her sis­ter. She laughs more than any baby I’ve ever seen, and that laugh is angelic. I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t know how long our luck will hold out, but what I do know is that I have two beau­ti­ful daugh­ters who have changed my life forever.

I have found friends where I did not expect, com­pa­tri­ots and sup­port. I have found that my cowork­ers, com­mu­nity and friends are more amaz­ing than I could have ever expected. And Addi­son thanks you:

 

Finally, Work

I love my job, what more is there to say? 2011 was a break out year for me per­son­ally — and a break out year for Nasuni — we’ve built some­thing amaz­ing, some­thing that com­pa­nies want. With any luck, we have begun to change how busi­nesses will store their data and what they come to expect from an enter­prise class prod­uct. I get to do what I love, with peo­ple that are awe­some.

Of course, 2011 found me grow­ing more into doing things I never really expected to be doing — I’ve con­tin­ued a shift from the back end/glue and more into the front-end, spend­ing most of my time work­ing on user inter­faces, beat­ing my head against inter­net explorer. I’ve spent more time in JavaScript than I care to admit. Learn­ing CSS, re-learning design, lay­out, think­ing con­stantly about user expe­ri­ence, star­ing at color palettes for days.

And I — We — are far from done. I’ve men­tally grown into a mind­set that “UI” (user inter­face) doesn’t just stand for the graphic design of a site — and that UX (user expe­ri­ence) isn’t just about how things are laid out on a page. UI/UX has to be thought about from the part the user sees, feels and uses all the way down to the low­est level API of your system.

Good Design (notice the big D) means APIs mat­ter. It means that every­thing from error mes­sages, to doc­u­men­ta­tion to cus­tomer sup­port and care mat­ter. You can’t ignore any of it. You can’t slap a CSS frame­work into place and think you’re done with “Design”. It means car­ing about the user com­pletely, and with­out regard to your biases or skills.

Good Design also mat­ters in com­mu­ni­ties — user expe­ri­ence, inter­faces — think­ing about oth­ers — of course, I’m get­ting ahead of myself and delv­ing into the sec­ond post.

Wrap­ping this one up

On a per­sonal level — 2011 was a year I doubt I’ll for­get any time soon. It’s been a mix­ture of pain and plea­sure and con­stant evo­lu­tion and change. 2011 changed who I fun­da­men­tally am as a per­son, and I hope I’ll never be the same.

Again, thank you all — you know who you are.

And to my fam­ily: Dusty, Addi­son, and Abi­gail (who is so smart it scares me) — I love you.

 

Yup; it's that time - everyone and their brother is doing a post looking back at 2011 and taking stock of the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm no different - 2011 was a year that largely represented a massive shift in my life's tectonic plates. I've decided to break this reflection into two related parts - the more personal stuff (this one) and the big-P Python stuff - both have seen shifts and changes worth noting, and both are inextricably tied for me. I've intentionally skipped all of the Python** stuff (including PyCon) that I've been working on - that's going to come next. Personal Changes In late 2010 I was playing paintball - something which everyone should try at least once - it truly is a blast. However, at the time I was grossly overweight (280/285 lbs heading to 300) and running around outdoors with 20+ lbs of equipment. It was a normal Sunday game when I pivoted in the perfectly wrong way - my foot had gotten stuck in some tree roots and when I pivoted, my right knee dislocated and I collapsed face-first into a pile of tree branches. I did not realize that my knee has dislocated, just that my leg wasn't working. I slapped my knee, hard, bent it and got up and kept playing. The adrenaline kept me going for several more hours while I continued to play on a knee of questionable veracity. When I got to my car a few hours later, all I knew is that my knee felt funny, and my cargo pants where tight where my knee was. When I got home and changed, the truth came out. My knee had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and turned several ugly colors. I figured I has injured it, and largely ignored it. Then the pain set in the next day. Fast forward through many doctor appointments, MRIs, and two more dislocations - once getting my daughter out of the bathtub which required my wife to come in and put my knee back into place because I was busy crying on the floor, and the second just getting out of bed. My knee, from that initial dislocation had become very weak. The doctor told me flat out that I needed physical therapy and rehab, otherwise surgery was going to be required. He told me I needed to change things. Looking at myself in the mirror, I realized that something had to be done - I was stressed, overweight and my path was out of whack. I couldn't deal with surgery with three year old and a now pregnant wife. I got a cortisone shot and went up the street to the local Bikram Yoga studio - I had never done yoga before - I walked in, slapped down some money and went into a 120 degree studio. This is a photo of my from June 2010:   I became a Bikram convert over night - the owner of the local studio Bob is an amazing man, friendly, kind - all of the instructors helped me through learning and growing and pushing through the pain, the heat and everything that comes with a grossly overweight ex-smoker who was drinking 2+ pots of coffee a day jumping in head first. I quickly ramped to doing classes 3 times a week. Additionally, I completely altered my diet - I've long dabbled in low-carb/no-carb/ketogenic, but this time I jumped in no-holds barred. No sugar, I cut my coffee intake to one cup a day, no carbs/gluten, period. 2011 came quickly, and I kept it up. Yoga, diet - lather, rinse and repeat. I shed enough weight that people at PyCon 2011 didn't recognize me. Good. Not good enough. Throughout 2011 I kept this up - dropping from an easy 280 lbs to 165 at my lowest. Later in the year I added weight lifting with coworkers at lunch - even later I started the couch to 5k program to start running (even doing it the "barefoot" way). Now, as the year turns, I weigh a healthy 175 lbs - I've put on muscle mass, kept my flexibility, kept on my diet which has shifted into a more Paleo form than what it had been (mainly adding fruit back in, but still skipping carbs/gluten/sugar - I still mostly only eat meat and vegetables). I can now run for 30 minutes without feeling like death and hit 4.2 miles. My knee still bothers me sometimes, but I've dodged surgery. I can now look at my daughters and wife and hope that I'll be around a lot longer than I would have been had I not done these things. I feel more alive than ever before. Me, December 2011:   During 2011, I also switched to an all standing desk setup (yup, despite the knee): "Switching to a Standing Desk" "The standing desk experiment - 5 months in" I'm happy to say that this continues - thanks to an excellent gift from my wife, I even have a nice standing setup at home now. It's been over 7 months since I last sat down at work to work. Sure, I sit at lunch, and in the car - I'm not that weird, but I continue to reap the benefits I outlined in those posts. I also started working on my mental health, and focus. Trying to learn how to meditate, working on minimizing distractions and building small improvements to my workflow. Focusing on being open to change and criticism. Focusing on things I had ignored for a long time. You can't go and just fix your physical self - you have to take care of the mental aspects as well. I've had to learn this over and over the hard way, and it is still a daily fight between what I was, and what I want to me. I have to focus on small changes and improvements constantly - otherwise it's deadly simple to fall back on old ways. I did a post some time ago - "On Family, Cranking and Changing" - I still read this once in awhile to remind myself where I need to go and what I need to accomplish. I can't lose sight. Now for the hard part. Children 2011 also brought my family to the brink - and I mean that in the literal sense. There was a time where my wife and I would look at each other hopelessly, wondering what we would do and how we would pull through. In June, we had our second daughter Addison Joy. The pregnancy was really rough and my coworkers and boss supported me through the needed "disappearing". My wife spent a lot of time in the hospital, and there were many times where we were worried that things wouldn't work out. Luckily, my wife - and Addison, pulled through. I don't know how they did it, and I suspect we've burnt a lifetime of karma and luck in just a few months, but they both came through. Addison was born, and I once again new the joys and pains of having a new born daughter. Throughout all of this, our oldest daughter Abigail trooped on through - it was a lot to ask for a 3/4 year old, but she continually amazed me. To look at her face and see how much she worships and loves her mother - to see how she loves Addison - that's to know something you'll never see anywhere else. Not everything was well - and we didn't know it yet, but the worst storm was yet to come. To quote my post - "Thank you - the impossibility of "It's going to be OK"": But, so, AJ was born - and at first, everything seemed to be fine. 10 fingers, 10 toes and pooping - that's sort of what you hope for in a newborn. We took her home, she saw her pediatrician, and that was that. Well, no. Around the time Addison was three weeks old (shortly before my first child's birthday) my wife Dusty started noticing that Addison was behaving erratically/oddly - and if you have any experience with infants, you'd know how hard it is to actually determine "odd" behavior. Almost everything they do is odd, down to timing exactly the worst moment when to spit up on you (point of fact - it is after you've showered, and are walking out the door). In this case, the odd behavior my wife noticed was actually a pattern - and that's when you need to worry. You want consistency in certain areas, you want to see continual improvement, you want them to consistently eat, poop and sleep. However, a pattern of odd movements tipped my wife (who is a fantastic analyst) off that something was not quite right. What my wife found was that Addison for periods of time anywhere from 1-2 minutes her eyes would slit and roll back and she would freeze up. The best way to describe it is it was almost as if she would just "check out" - as if someone hit a power switch. It's still hard for me to read that post - it's difficult for me to communicate the emotions - the fear, the outright terror of not knowing what was wrong with our baby girl. More hospitals, more doctors. My new born daughter with a helmet of leads and electrodes coming off of her head. Sleeping in cots in hospital rooms. My wife eloquently wrote a series of posts: "Welcome AJ" "One of Many Hard Days" "The Diagnosis and moving forward" "Updates" "God, Are you there?" "I make her smile" Something I say in that thank you post is something that will stick in my mind forever. When my friends and people I barely knew in the Python community heard and saw what we were going through as a family, the support we got was flooring. It still makes me tear up thinking of all the cards, well wishes and other things - a little toy for Abigail, Doug Napoleone coming over to help me out with something, everything that the Python community did for our family. It is, and was amazing. I can never thank all of you enough for what you did for us, and how you helped us pull through. The number of emails I got from other parents in the community who suffered through things like this, the well wishes - I, I can't even go into everything that happened. Words can not express it. All I can say is that many times, my wife and I found ourselves in tears, crying with one another because of some act or gift or email from someone in the community. In October, I did a quick Google+ post, providing an update on how things had panned out - quoting that post: Addison's diagnosis - if you want to call it that - is Cerebral Palsy - Hypertonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertonia). This means that she does have a disorder, but it's not one treated with drugs - just physical therapy and frequent checkups. We have a nurse and a physical therapist who come weekly and check on her thanks to early intervention. She's developing well - she's eating baby food, smiling and generally being a normal baby. All we have to do is keep up with the therapy and in theory her brain will "auto correct" as time goes on. She's 17lbs and counting at just about 5 months and just giving hints of crawling. In addition to the hypertonia, she was diagnosed with non epileptic seizures - again, not something we can do much about other than to love her, keep up with checkups and wait. So that's where we are - we have a happy, cooing, laughing, happy baby and just have to keep a close eye on her and work through things that come up. It's too early to tell if her problems will have long term consequences. The doctors all hope that she's "error correct" around these things and she'll be OK. But we won't know until we see her development at 6 months, 9 months and 1 year - we still have that "threat" that something could happen - her brain could stop developing, or conditions could get worse. But its hard to think about that - because I don't see the problems - every day, I pick up and hold and play with a beautiful, cheerful baby who wants nothing more than to chew on my fingers (she's teething) and laugh. I don't think about the future much, because it's unknowable, and we'll cross that bridge when it comes. Sometimes it pops into my head - that worry, that doubt, and I push it to the side and think of what we've already gone through. It's now December - almost January. Addison has continued to thrive - the fear and the worry aren't forgotten - we have regular visits from a physical therapist and nurse to continually check on her. She still has some issues we continue to work through, and we've got a series of appointments with neurology specialists, but its hard to think that anything is "wrong" with her at all. She's almost 20lbs (huge baby!) - she's babbling, she's gotten her first tooth (on christmas eve to boot) - she loves her walker and worships her sister. She laughs more than any baby I've ever seen, and that laugh is angelic. I don't know what the future holds, and I don't know how long our luck will hold out, but what I do know is that I have two beautiful daughters who have changed my life forever. I have found friends where I did not expect, compatriots and support. I have found that my coworkers, community and friends are more amazing than I could have ever expected. And Addison thanks you:   Finally, Work I love my job, what more is there to say? 2011 was a break out year for me personally - and a break out year for Nasuni - we've built something amazing, something that companies want. With any luck, we have begun to change how businesses will store their data and what they come to expect from an enterprise class product. I get to do what I love, with people that are awesome. Of course, 2011 found me growing more into doing things I never really expected to be doing - I've continued a shift from the back end/glue and more into the front-end, spending most of my time working on user interfaces, beating my head against internet explorer. I've spent more time in JavaScript than I care to admit. Learning CSS, re-learning design, layout, thinking constantly about user experience, staring at color palettes for days. And I - We - are far from done. I've mentally grown into a mindset that "UI" (user interface) doesn't just stand for the graphic design of a site - and that UX (user experience) isn't just about how things are laid out on a page. UI/UX has to be thought about from the part the user sees, feels and uses all the way down to the lowest level API of your system. Good Design (notice the big D) means APIs matter. It means that everything from error messages, to documentation to customer support and care matter. You can't ignore any of it. You can't slap a CSS framework into place and think you're done with "Design". It means caring about the user completely, and without regard to your biases or skills. Good Design also matters in communities - user experience, interfaces - thinking about others - of course, I'm getting ahead of myself and delving into the second post. Wrapping this one up On a personal level - 2011 was a year I doubt I'll forget any time soon. It's been a mixture of pain and pleasure and constant evolution and change. 2011 changed who I fundamentally am as a person, and I hope I'll never be the same. Again, thank you all - you know who you are. And to my family: Dusty, Addison, and Abigail (who is so smart it scares me) - I love you.