2010 Year in Review

This article was originally posted on my personal website at the time, adamfortuna.com. I’m transitioning content from there to here on Minafi as it’s forever home. Although this article was written long before Minafi was started, it’s a nice opportunity to reflect.

In 2010 I was dating my now wife and working at Izea, living in Orlando, Florida. I turned 28 during this year and was really into Ruby on Rails. Although many of these initiatives would later end up on my failure resume, they were great learning experiences and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Here’s the post as (mostly) originally published. Some names removed and broken links fixed.

My yearly recap of what’s happened in my life over the last year.

Travel

• Twitters first Developer Conference in San Francisco, Chirp and got to see family in the area
• My first cruise- – a 7 day Royal Caribbean cruise to Haiti, Jamaica, The Grand Cayman Islands and Cozumel with Marilyn
• Went horseback riding on a somewhat wild horse named Alarma in Cozumel
• Climbed a waterfall in Jamaica.
• Went Scalloping at Homosassa Springs
• Attended Crab Feast in St. Petersburg!
• Stayed at the Don Cesar in St. Petersburg for a friends Wedding
• Went to Miami Beach for a friends bachelor party and stayed at the iconic Eden Roc
• Westin Channelside and Hard Rock Casino for Izea’s retreat

Life

• Started a 4’x9′ vegetable garden
• Began composting
• Bought a wheelbarrow
• Had our first yard sale at this house
• Cleaned out the garage to where we can actually use it
• Dropped cable TV in favor of using Plex, Netflix, and Hulu
• Digitized most my DVDs and media. Still a few to go, but the bulk of the work is over
• Slowly increasing savings and investments on Vanguard and following investment advice from John Bogle
• Had a major disagreement with GE over them charging me $400 for something they broke. Complained on Twitter and they resolved it before my check was even cashed.
• Developed an appreciation for beer
• Went on an indoor plant buying frenzy resulting in many casualties. Only the strong survive.
• Played on my works kickball team with Mrs. Minafi

Events and Entertainment

• Flaming Lips and Imogen Heap concerts at Hard Rock Orlando
• Got Disney passes and went to Epcot’s Food and Wine Festival way too many times
• Saw Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm at The Social
• Saw Rick Springfield and Boyz 2 Men at Epcot (but we missed Hanson)
• Largest holiday party so far over at our place
• Tron Legacy Midnight release with Marilyn and friends
• Lots of movies. My favorites that came out this year were Inception, Exit Through the Gift Shop and The Social Network
• Favorite TV shows discovered were Breaking Bad, House, Jericho and The Colony
• Played through Mass Effect twice and Mass Effect 2 almost twice and loved them both
• Thanksgiving at Marilyn’s Moms, with firetruck and family
• Went to Plazaween in costume with Marilyn and friends

Programming and Technology

• Launched Cost Per Click for SponsoredTweets
• Helped get SocialSpark V2 launched and did a tiny bit of work on WeReward
• Started organizing hack days and lunch-and-learns at work, we even had a chance for a hack week!
• Completely dropped organized hosting on Dreamhost in favor of S3, Posterous and Github.
• Launched MovieFly.org , then a few months later Miso launched with the same idea.
• Changed AdamFortuna.com into a splash page instead of a blog
• Started a mobile blog for pictures taken from my phone
• Moved ArcadeFly.com over to Heroku
• Bought an iPad, a new shuffle running and upgraded to an iPhone4
• Started learning iOS development
• Started working on a new site in Rails 3 that should launch next year
• Messed around with some new technology over the year including node.js, redis, websockets, css3, html and mongo db
• Upgraded to Road Runner Lightning, and slowly backing everything I have up to BackBlaze

As for new years resolutions? Probably increase savings a bit more, eat a little healthier and spend less time on the couch. Like to eat out less and get better at creating the things I love to eat and drink from scratch including salad dressing, sauces and brewing beer- – and maybe later on wine. If there’s one thing I want to do in 2011 though, it’d be launching the site I’m working on in my spare time, and do it right.