Part of the pleasure of starting again is feeling the years and years of riding behind me -- the teenage bolting around like a lunatic and learning how to land on my feet, the years in my twenties when David drummed cadence into me -- coming up and helping, like a whale surfacing under a struggling swimmer. As if those years weren't wasted after all; as if all is not lost.

--yatima

In 2011 my past paid off splendidly. For more than a decade, sometimes without knowing it, I'd been investing in my domain knowledge, skills, credentials, and personal network. So when I started looking for project management and open source consulting work (starting in December 2010), I fairly quickly had as much work as I could handle. The job I have now is the most absorbing and rewarding I've ever had, excepting perhaps my two weeks of farm labor in the summer of 2007.

I worked thoroughly and consistently and busily in 2011. I saw my family, but I didn't see friends enough, and we didn't host enough parties. Then again I travelled a lot; there were months when I was away more than two weeks at a time. Barely exercised. Still married to Leonard, still childless. This year I started supporting him so he can concentrate on his fiction. We discovered Breaking Bad and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I wrote about 6,814 emails, just under 500 public blog entries (here, Geek Feminism, Wikimedia Foundation blog), and probably 150 dents/tweets. Some of the best things I wrote in 2011:

• A half-hour standup comedy act, performed at various New York and DC locations, Community Leadership Summit, Open Source Bridge, Professional IT Community Conference, and the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit.
• "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, and tricking yourself"- if I succeed all the time, I'm not thinking big enough.
• The idea of MATERIAL VELOUR, COLOR UNKNOWN, which turned into a fifth of the "Imaginary Book Club" panel at WisCon.
• A review of Atul Gawande's Better - "The joke I make about my Indian parents is that it would have been okay for me to turn into a doctor, because a doctor is an engineer of the body."
• "All that school comes in handy sometimes!"
• A proposal that didn't get me the gig (managing R&D for a small startup, focusing on increasing their open source presence and making them leaders of a few useful but basically unmaintained projects; they've since incorporated some of my advice and seem to be doing well).
• "Three glimpses: Transformative work, public domain music, and ethics" - "It's amateurs, not big publishing companies, who are crowdsourcing free access to the sheet music of the Western heritage."
• "A Slightly Disjointed (Due To A Five-Day Cold) Musing On Open Source, Fear, Motivation, And Witnessing" - "I don't want to keep my friends blissfully ignorant of this. Is there a more loving human impulse than the joy of sharing? I'm sorry, C."
• A small part of the Joel on Coal parody (Julia Rios wrote most of it), and a project postmortem.
• The press release for GNOME 3.0.
• "It's always worthwhile remembering the history of technology."
• "A Loose Constellation of Thoughts on WikiLeaks" - "not countries but networks, like Al Qaeda and WikiLeaks. They use individual countries, the way one uses a coffeeshop that has a particularly lenient free wifi policy...."
• A description of how MediaWiki developers test, and of how we ought to. "But our codebase is so spaghetti & global-ridden that writing proper unit tests will be very difficult until we do some refactoring..."
• A 45-minute talk, "Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes," for Open Source Bridge. Subheaders include "Why do projects fail?", "Evil list", "Suit-friendly presentations", "Lenses", and "Q&A about measuring intangibles".
• "'Put up or shut up'" - the double-edged sword of the do-ocratic norm, and how we sometimes use it to shut down uncomfortable conversations. The very people who need certain new policies, procedures and abstractions are least able and worst placed to implement them.
• "Google, gossip, and gamification: comparing and contrasting technical learning styles" - my tale of failure and return. How do you learn technical material and skills? Did your first attempt go awry, too?
• The 20-minute presentation "How to get what you want from MediaWiki developers" at Wikimania.
• A description of how Launchpad developers review each others' code. "Code reviewing is not primarily a gate to keep bugs out of code, but a social step, to get a second set of eyes on code, and to spread knowledge around."
• "Do you ever make up stories about the mushrooms as you move them around?"
• "Everybody's Doing It: Some Hackathon Tips".
• A writeup of a Wikimedia hackathon.
• Probably hundreds of messages to the Wikimedia developers' mailing list.
• "Practices, And Practice" - "so the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working.... you are not alone."
• Hundreds of private blog entries in the accountability group blog. I am so grateful for this small community that helps me keep balanced and keep going.

Happy New Year.