2015 recap

This is the time of year that I usually do my monthly recap of the year/monthly meme, where I post the first sentence of the first post of each month. Last year's version, with links to the previous iterations, is here.

This year was not a good year for posting. So rather than select among my sad number of posts in 2015 (26!) I figured I'd do a general overview of the year.

Some people in real life and the blogosphere have expressed concern because my posting frequency has dropped off. But actually, I didn't post as much because I had a bunch of other (mostly positive) things going on and other distractions. For me, 2015 was a pretty good year. In comparison, 2010 was a pretty bad year (I summed it up in this post as "thank God that's over") and 2011 had notable highs and lows personally and professionally.

I would sum up 2015 as "busy" for me. I did a ton of traveling, often on short notice. I stayed overnight (in hotels) in 10 states, stayed more than 50 nights in one hotel, and worked overtime (more than 40 hours) more than half of the weeks this year. I think my maximum number of hours worked in one week was about 75. I also spent a big chunk of the year doing "stretch" work - new tasks that were technically challenging. 

I still have that stack of post-it notes with ideas for blog posts - a few of them are complicated and I need to rethink them, and a few are a bit "fresh" and need to wait some more time so that I can anonymize them a bit more. But let's see if I can post here a little more consistently in 2016.