Good stuff that is specific to me:
- Of course, the best thing is mini-Elbeno. We started the year getting ready for his arrival, and since he's been here our lives have been changed forever in a wonderful way. And we have also been keeping in closer contact with the rest of the family since he came along, which is good.
- In Spring, my promotion was made official. I'm working with great people, doing more talking and writing about code and spending more time coding the really interesting stuff. Of course, the flip side of being a lead engineer is that the buck stops here.
Good stuff that anyone can enjoy:
- Nintendo. The Wii is fantastic (Wii Sports, really just a bunch of originally-proof-of-concept mini-games, is winning awards left and right) and it's changing the way people play. The DS is also awesome and this year Nintendo reminded us that video games are about having fun!
- The Long Tail. The power of blogging (see Time's Person of the Year) and convergence culture. The long tail is affecting my industry with the design impact of small boundary-pushing games like Flow, Narbacular Drop and Brain Age.
- Free Software. I feel like it's really starting to make a difference to people other than server administrators. Firefox continues to grow market share and looks to be still outpacing IE7. Ubuntu is the first flavour of Linux that really does “just work” for me. And apps like Democracy are coming good in the right place at the right time.
I'm sure there is more good stuff I'm not thinking of right now…