Inspired by Holger Woltersdorf and his post on the 24 days of December website I thought I could write a little thank you note. At least it is the time of the year to get all warm and fuzzy, so let’s do this.
One of my many New Year’s resolutions last year was to get more involved with the PHP community and try to give something back. When I told my boss about my plans he was kind of sceptic first, but after all he agreed to let me do a lot of community activities on my company time.
So my fist thank you goes out to my boss Kostas. For showing faith in my plan and letting me do what I did the last year. I understand your struggles and I really appreciate it.
For me user groups play a big role for the php community. I try to attend our local user group in Munich as often as possible and I gave my first talk ever at the PHP user group Munich. Nowadays they still let me test drive new talk ideas. This is something I’ll ever be grateful for. The phpugmunich is fortunate to have a lot of supporters for locations, food and drinks and we always thank those supporters. What we often miss is thanking the people organizing everything and making sure everybody has a good time at every meeting.
So, Robert Dahlke, Matthias Burger, Annibale Magni and Michael Haeuslmann thank you very much for putting up the hard work.
Since my Job and private life require me to travel a lot I used this as an opportunity to visit other user groups in Frankfurt, Mannheim, Cologne, Dresden and Münster. And what can I say, it was the best thing I did this last year. I met so many great people and all the organizers let me present talks, loot a lot of stickers and spread the word about my projects.
Thank you so much Andreas Heigl, Stephan Hochdörfer, Holger Woltersdorf, Tommy Mühle and Benjamin Cremer. It is always a pleasure to visit your user groups and especially meeting you guys.
Besides speaking at user groups I try to speak at conferences as well. I apply at a lot at conferences and so I get rejected a lot. But I heard that’s normal. I try to not get bummed out too much about it. On the other side this makes me even happier if one of my talks gets accepted. This year I was fortunate to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam and the International PHP Conference in Munich.
A big thank you to the organizers. I had a great time and I felt honored speaking at your events.
And last but not least thanks to everyone who took the time to listen to one of my talks, lectures or trainings. I had a great time with all of you. I can only hope you felt the same. And a big special thanks to those giving me feedback or discussing ideas.
Looking forward to 2018 I will off course continue to visit user groups. I’ll definitely try to visit some new ones. Hamburg, Berlin and Düsseldorf are on the top of my list there. Maybe I even visit some international ones.
Lately I missed a lot of Call for Papers deadlines, but I’ll try my luck and start submitting talk proposals again, after moving in January.
Since I did not implement two of my loudly communicated resolutions for 2017 I’m not going into detail for 2018. But looking at my github commit history for 2017 feels kind of sad 😉
That’s all from me this year. I’ll spend the last days of the year with my loved ones, exchanging gifts, eating too much, laughing a lot and maybe I can squeeze in some snowboarding.
I wish you all happy holidays and a happy New Year.