Unwinding and realining - the year in review

2008 has been an exciting year.

Major highlights:

1) Weathered out the initial economic downturn. I ended a contract gig in February, and went to a system engineering position at an entertainment company and got laid off due to internal politics and a weak outlook for entertainment. I then took a position with an internet advertising company and got laid off after the 777 dow drop. I am now at a digital signage / advertising company.

2) Attended several conferences (BarCampLA/BarCampSanDiego/MerbCamp/Interop). I'm sure there were others. I also was much more active at the local lugs then I was in 2007.

3) Actively participated in numerous mailing lists, including AFNOG/SANOG/NANOG,WISPA,local lugs, various open source projects.

4) Tried my hand at various ventures, and really learned a lot about the product development life cycle.

5) Became laser beam focused on building out the socal wifi network and localization, as a way to get out of the recession.

I also realized that in order to stay focused on leading the socal wifi project I need to start operating at a more strategic level. In support of this I have unsubscribed from numerous mailing lists:

1) Operations lists: AFNOG/SANOG/NANOG/WISPA
2) Project lists:
ath5k/ath9k/linux-wimax
click/quagga/liberouter/xorp
mogilefs
mpls-linux
v6ops/ec2ubuntu
olsr-dev/olsr-user/open80211s

Yeah.... I was tracking a lot of projects.

Why did I unsubscribe from the project lists? While they are very interesting, they're just too much information. I don't need to track the development of them, and thus far I haven't run into any issues with usage of an open source project that hasn't been answered via a quick net search.

The group lists? There is way too much noise and not nearly enough signal. I have found much more valuable information from google alerts/blogs etc.

For now I am staying on several of the regional mailing lists.

I'll do another post later on my plans and directons for 2009.