This post has become an annual tradition. Each year, I take some time to look back on the year - I reflect on the good and the bad. A couple of years ago, the sad events surrounding my leaving pingVision sent me down a path of starting a company and beginning work with Examiner.com. This year has really involved the maturing the Development engine at Examiner with a great deal of focus on process.

Examiner starting using Drupal 7 before it was much more than a twinkle in Webchick's eye. It was barely committed to HEAD and wasn't even barely close to being ready for prime time. After 1 year of officially having D7 released, Examiner.com started looking at its coded base and the length of time it was taking to upgrade its core to the lastest security release. Many of the forks were related to Examiner's need to have incomplete chunks of D7 working. This year we undid what we had done making core upgrades much simpler.

Being able to do multivariate testing became a high priority for the company this past year. Using Google Optimizer and some clever work from our theme team, multivariate and A/B testing became a reality. Being able to test different layouts and determine the relative success of each layout is a powerful tool in any Website's toolbox.

Examiner also experienced a radical update to its look and feel. The editions became less important with the notion we would focus on topics and regions. A thing we call the "Topic Portal" was born - much more complex and interesting than straight tag pages with a reverse chronological river of news. These pages had elements that could be curated integrated. We created major buckets of kinds of content - those pages were integrated into the site.

Examiner has been living without a Block UI since it migrated to Drupal over 18 months ago. A variety of reason precluded our using the standard block system, so chx continued to work on MongoDB Block UI and the baton was passed to Andrew Lasda (at Examiner) completed the work with the help of Nagba.

Over a year ago, I started work with the Drupalcon Denver Organizing Committee planning the event here in Colorado. It is hard to believe we only have 79 days left until the event. That is actually a fairly terrifying statistic. But, at Drupalcon Chicago, we officially announced that the event was making its way to the "Mile High City".

Drupalcamp Colorado had Examiner spending a fairly significant amount of time recruiting. We were fortunate finding Draenen (Caleb Thorne), a very talented guy from Colorado Springs. I owe Rick a beer in March as Draenen came from our colleagues at Monarch Digital. Sorry Rick! We also started working heavily with a themer from Colorado Springs. Pixelwhip (John Ferris), has proven to be a tremendous addition to the team.

Drupalcon London was a different Drupalcon for me. This is mostly due to my having so much family in and around London. Quite a bit of spare time was spent hanging out with Family and non-Drupal friends. That said, the convention was very much about maintaining and building on my professional ties in the community. I was afforded the opportunity to share with others the amazing work that is being done at Examiner.com, spending time with other Drupal-minded project managers and business professionals.

Six months ago, Examiner's process started changing radically. We began the shift to a Hybrid Agile Project Management approach, which I presented as part of my Keynote at Drupalcamp Austin. It was an honour and a privilege to be asked and to present. I was thrilled to get some real facetime with Webchick. I want to call out my professional partner and friend, Stacey Harrison, who complements my skills in managing the Dev team with amazing insight and acumen. She has helped organize our shift to Agile in ways I would have found difficult to do on my own. THANK YOU.

My work on the Trauma Adoption support site for foster and adoptive families continued over the last year. I regularly get "thank you" notes from folks expressing that knowing there are other parents with identical challenges very much reduces and removes the high level of isolation they feel when working with the Child of Trauma. These parents are selfless and are one of the binding glues that help support the most vulnerable members of our society. These are kids without resources, without their biological parents, and whom have often been abused emotionally and/or physically. If you know a foster parent or a adoptive parent who adopted from the foster system - thank them. The greatest gift might well be offering to babysit for a night.

Vintage Digtial LLC continues to quietly percolate along. The co-op members all have full time work they engage in, but the pleasure of working with this team makes keeping the company quietly humming all worth while.

This post is generally about my professional life. However, one anniversary that is more personal seems worth while calling out. My last appointment to my oncologist sets me at 11 years cancer free. Last Year I wrote a fairly personal email about how cancer had affected me. This year is the first full year of being cured not just in remission. Still, I think about it every day and it really did change my entire attitude to the world.

Looking back at the year is good. It gives perspective. Just like the retrospective in an Agile timebox allows you to look at what has worked and what hasn't worked - spending some time reflecting on your year allows course corrections at a personal level. Thanks to everybody at Examiner.com - I have grown this year because of you. Thanks to my wife and my daughter - you both make what I do professionally make sense. Finally, thank you to the Drupal Community. Drupal intertwines itself in so many aspects of my life ranging from my professional path to how I help support the fostadopt community to my personal writings. You folks are my colleagues and my friends.

Lets look forward to an amazing 2012!