2011 has been and gone, all in all an excellent year for me; much better than the few clusterfuck years before. Going into 2012 with tons of positive energy and going to make it even better!

Sadly, not everything was perfect. In October my grandmother and one of my uncles passed away. Around the same time my Dad’s shop was robbed, twice. That was a tough period for my parents and the entire family, still not over it completely, but not giving up either! We love and support each other and will get out stronger than ever.

Now that the bad part is out, let’s jump to the awesome part ;)

Life changing decisions

In 2011 I actually had three life changing decisions.

First one in March, when I decided to finally quit smoking. And I did it! After 11 years I finally threw that shit away. Gave me a nice self-confidence boost, gained much needed weight – around 10kgs (now just to prevent that turning into fat and into muscles instead) – and I feel much, much better overall.

For the second one I owe a lot to my parents and to Srdjan Vranac, for their continuos support and making it possible to happen. In May I handed over my resignation at my previous job and in June I started my own company, Hex, and joined up with Vranac. Just this one thing changed my life to better in so many ways that I can’t thank Vranac enough for all he did, and is still doing! Thank you :)

The third decision happened in August when I cut my hair. And nope, I didn’t regret it :)

Friends and conferences

This year I spoke at two conferences, DORS/CLUC in May in Zagreb, and Webkonf in October in Budapest. My talks didn’t turn out that good (heck, the second one was pure horror), but I did make new friends which trumps bad talks any day!

In Zagreb I had the honor to meet fellow hacker Nikola Plejić, who kindly offered me a place to stay during the conference and showed me around the city. Now waiting for him to come to Novi Sad so I can return the favor. :)

In Budapest I met fellow hackers Ferenc Kovács and Dubravszky József. Great people with whom I’d like to grab a beer or two this year :)

Open source and hacking

Contributed to web2project and Zend Framework throughout the year, but somewhere in September got really close to a burn out so I decided to back up a little and have a break. I’m trying to ease my way back in to contributing and general hacking now. Need to be careful though, don’t want to get this close to a burn out again, next time might not see the line.

Started to learn C just for fun. Don’t know what to do with it yet, can’t hurt learning/knowing it.

All in all, awesome year which set the bar high for 2012, but with all this positive energy it will be a piece of cake to fly over it!

Happy hackin’ and a happy new year!

This past weekend the Hungarian web conference was held in the amazing Buda Castle, in Budapest. It was a one day conference, with talks being held on 3 tracks, all in all 21 talk. This was my first time here and I attended as a speaker with a talk on Zend Framework 2 (more on that later).

The conference was great, and, as per the organizers, attended by more than 700 people! The building is quite big, so I didn’t feel like it was too crowded, but there were some complaints about not having enough seats for everyone. I found it weird that there was no proper lunch time set, with only 15-20 minutes left between sessions, so I ended up eating only after 3PM.

The talks I attended were also great, especially the PHP 5.4 introduction talk by Kovács Ferenc, aka Tyr43l, and the MySQL high availability and the InnoDB data recovery talks by Podor István.

As for my talk… Well, that was just plain horror. I got so nervous at the beginning that I completely forgot what was I supposed to say. A completely blank mind. Just standing there, looking at the slides and not knowing what am I even doing there… Completely fubar’d the first part of the presentation. The second part got somewhat better, but my overall feeling is just… Ugh, kill me now, please.

Anyway, I decided to give up on my speaking “career” and just stick to programming.

Happy hackin’!

Just as we had a blog movement back in March, thanks to Stuart Herbert we now have a new one for October – Oktober(blog)fest! :)

The rules are easy:

• Write a post called Oktober(blog)Fest.
• List some of the reasons you like blogs.
• Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
• Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #oktoberblogfest hashtag.
• If we all blog a little more than we normally would this month, maybe we can be reminded of all of the reasons blogs are great.

Well, here I am, pledging that I’ll be blogging a bit more in the coming days/weeks/months. I really do like blogging, don’t know why am I so lazy about it.

Don’t expect anything revolutionary from me tho, heh. An update or two from this weeks Webkonf and maybe some news from the Zend Framework 2 world :)

Happy hackin’!

I’ll be giving a talk at this year’s Hungarian Web Conference, Webkonf, which will be held on October 8th in Budapest. The topic of the talk is Zend Framework 2 and with the recent happenings in the framework world and in the community (thanks Paddy!), it will be both interesting and challenging to create a talk worth listening :) Oh, and I’ll be presenting in Hungarian :)

If you’ll be there, I’d like to meet you :) I’ll be in Budapest from Friday the 7th, till Sunday the 9th.

So, I got a haircut after 8 years.

This is the result. If you want, have a look at the whole album here: There, I fix’d it

I think it turned out pretty damn good.