Max Manders

2011 has truly been a fantastic year!

Without a doubt, the highlight of my year has to be marrying my darling wife Jo.  It was a perfect, wonderful day, and we all enjoyed a brilliant reception in the evening.  That was followed by an amazing honeymoon in the gorgeous French capital of Paris; and after 27 years, my first trip abroad!  Jo and I also managed to squeeze in a second holiday, or honeymoon-part-deux to Nice in October, which was as equally amazing as Paris — we’ll definitely be back!

We also both managed to stop smoking, which is a fantastic achievement for us both!  I originally stopped at the start of the year, but fell off the wagon when we went to Paris.  Still we’ve both stopped now and that’s what’s important.  I’ve also spent the majority of the year cycling to work, and managed to lose a bit of weight in the process — long may that trend continue!

I also had an excellent year professionally!  I made it to the Highland Fling conference in my home town of Edinburgh.  A brilliantly well organised and run conference with a great line up of speakers.  It made me realise that although I’m not a particularly skilled designer, I haven’t been paying enough attention to front-end tools and techniques; something I hope to remedy in the year ahead.  I also took on a new role with Maglabs as a Business Analyst; I’ll be spending more time gathering requirements and designing software than coding.  This may give me more head space to work on some personal projects and contribute more to this blog!

I managed to release something on Github!  MSIE2VBOX (catchy!) is a little script to automate installation of VMs from Microsoft for testing Internet Explorer on VirtualBox.  It’s a little buggy, but I’m trying to keep up!

… 2012

Who knows what 2012 has in store?! Having had a taste for travelling abroad, I think Jo and I would both like to get away for a holiday again.  There’s a good chance I’ll be travelling more, albeit with work and within the UK, as I continue  to analyse and design brilliant software for brilliant clients.  Sadly that means a few nights away from my lovely wife but I’m sure we’ll cope!  I’d also like to spend more time working on a few personal coding projects, as well as doing more technical writing on this blog.  I’ve also been to far too few local meetups in Edinburgh so I’d like to make an appearance at EdLUG, TechMeetup and EdiPUG more this coming year.

I’ve been playing more trombone this year, and it’s something I want to make more of a habit; I might try and find a band or orchestra to join.  I also want to read more and take more photos.  I might try the whole photo365 thingumy and take a reasonable photo every day in 2012!

Wishing everyone happiness and prosperity for the year ahead!