Every time around this year we have about 800 blog posts on how great or how horrible or what happened in the year or the decade. The decade is closing and I will say this that it was one of my favorites. I graduated from high school, college, and I started my first real job. I was active in LGBT rights clubs, Interfaith Clubs, .Net User Groups, SharePoint User Groups. I lead the planning of 2 successful SharePoint Saturday events.
I attended these events:
- MOSS Camp St. Louis (2008 and 2009)
- Tulsa School of Dev (2008)
- Tulsa Techfest
- SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach, KC (2x), NY, Boston, Charlotte, Ozarks, Tulsa, Chicago, DC (2x)
- SP Tech Con San Francisco
- Hartford Code Camp
- Raleigh Code Camp
- SharePoint Conference
I visited these user groups:
- Jacksonville Office Geeks
- KC Office Geeks
- KC .Net User Group
- Omaha .Net User Group
- Omaha SharePoint User Group
- St. Louis .Net User Group
- San Antonio SharePoint User Group
- Heartland Developer’s User Group SharePoint SIG
I guess what really sticks out for me over some of the other people out there is that I became an adult in this decade. I was 17 years old when the last decade ended with a pipe dream that I would one day get a college degree and leave St. Louis. The icing on the cake is that I left St. Louis. I live at least 900 miles away from home and about 1 hour and 20 minutes away from New York City. If there are actually college students or high school students reading this blog the best I can tell you is keep persisting. Keep going. You can do it. I did it. It doesn’t matter if you live in the tiniest town in the world. Just go out there take a risk take a chance and you’ll end up with what you want eventually. All I can say is be patient and don’t give up. Keep this in mind when you pass onto the next the decade. It might take you a whole 10 years maybe less maybe more, but you’ll get there. Happy new year everyone!