2006 from Wez's perspective

Here's 2006 from my point of view. I did tinker a bit with the appearance of my blog, but that's not really a high point of the year for me. My year went a bit like this:

I started the year with a couple of EvilDesk releases, which in turn generated some snarky feedback from a couple of people in the PHP community, cooling my drive for working on PHP. Work and family pressures didn't help to restore my earlier level of PHP activity, and to be honest, some words and actions in the PHP community over the year didn't really help either.

MessageLabs chose us to provide their MTA infrastructure, which saw me back in the UK a couple of times at the start of the year while we worked together to plan part of the architecture.

I ported Solaris' memory manager (umem) to the "other" platforms (linux, windows and bsdish systems).

My older brother suffered a set-back this year, and I wish I could have helped him out a lot more than I did.

I started to test-drive google calendar, but that petered out because I can't put company confidential information in there. It's a shame, because it works well.

I finally got some of my writings published in a book, although not an entire book of my own.

I spoke at MySQLUC, OSCON, php|works and zendcon and attended the first MS web dev summit. Memorable moments around these events include being stuck in the seedier part of Phoenix for a night on the way to MySQLUC (not a fond memory to be sure!), awful karaoke at the Sun party @OSCON, excellent home-made sushi and xbox 360 on a 120" screen at a friends home in Seattle on the way back from OSCON, a really good British style pub in Toronto during php|works, reasonable karaoke at zendcon, Andrei's birthday party after zendcon and meeting Don Box at the MS web dev summit.

Our 4 year old son Xander started at pre-school and is doing well.

The death of my faithful toshiba m30 saw me adopt an intel based macbook, partly for the native unix environment and partly to force me to learn about the oddities of its runtime linker. I still have complaints about the way certain things work, but on the whole I am a happy user, made happier by Parallels because I still need Windows based software.

OmniTI has grown a decent amount this year, and we moved premises and now have two business units--OmniTI the Computer Consulting company and Message Systems the messaging company; both arms of the company have done well this year and are set to continue doing so in the future. Work continues to be fun, interesting and challenging, with great people on staff (that's all of them, not just the "internet celebrities").

I've been the architect of several large pieces of infrastructure for Ecelerity this year, one of which is in the realm of meta-meta programming (gives your brain a workout, guaranteed!). I'm looking forward to seeing the fruits of this labor in 2007, and to getting around to work on some more of the juicy ideas we continue to have for expanding and improving things.

What about PHP? I've been working on a unicode enabled version of PDO for the preview release of PHP 6. This should be completed soon, and I look forward to continued improvements in the PDO drivers and, in particular, the OCI driver which is long overdue some TLC. I've also been toying with something OSX specific for PHP that just isn't close to ready yet; maybe that will be something I can share in the first quarter of 2007.

Here's to a prosperous 2007!