Usually people tend to do a retrospective on the past year and set new goals for the new year at the beginning of the year.
In order to counteract this trend and taking advantage that today is my birthday, I’ll do this today.

2010 was a nice year, on a personal level it was quite ok ’cause I managed to acomplish most of my 2009 main goals:

1st. Buy house in Lisbon
2nd. Attend PHP Summer School
3rd. Attend Sapo Codebits and develop a fully working project in the 48 hours programming contest
4th. Finish my Master Thesis

Looking back…

I’m currently living in Lisbon, and drastically reduced the time spent travelling to/from work, significantly improving my quality of life. Now I can wake up thirty minutes before going to work, instead of two and half hours, like I used to do when I was still living in Setúbal, wich is really cool.

Because I’m living in Lisbon, it becomes quite easy to attend to more events that take place there, specially the ones described on 2nd and 3rd goals, ’cause they last several days.

Last September I finaly had the chance to attend PHP Summer School – Advanced Topics. To be honest, I must say that it didn’t exactly correspond to what I had in mind. Because of it’s name I was expecting some more advanced lectures… However most of my course colleagues, which participated in the intruductory version, were very happy. In my humble opinion, at least one new version of the course should be created, probably named “Ninja Topics” and built based on feedback from Portuguese community.

In November I attended Sapo Codebits, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. This is one of the biggest events, if not the biggest one, that takes place in Portugal. I got there with @hiphip, one of my colleagues at DRI, and we managed to develop a Web application related with bets and social interactions. Although our project didn’t won any prize, we felt like “mission accomplished” when it was selected from a large set of projects to be presented on the main stage.

Finally my master thesis, this is the only goal that I could not accomplish… I had to get it done by the end of last September and unfortunatly I barely started it due to several aspects that aren’t worth to talk about.

With this in mind, my main goals this year will be:

1st. Finish my Master Thesis
2nd. Attend Sapo Codebits 2011.
3rd. Attend more events, national and international like PHP Barcelona Conference 2011!
4th. Become a Zend Certified Engineer, this one is optional since it requires time to study and the amount of time available will depend on my Master Thesis evolution.

Lets hope that in one year from now, I can mark them all as acomplished!