After leaving the salaried world, I started a practice of reviewing each year to pick out highlights. The goal is to annually pick out 52 highlights (pro-rated for how late I am on doing the review). I’ve been working for myself for 217 weeks and it’s been 53 weeks since I did my last review. See also 164 things, 109 things, and 53 things.

This practice has been surprisingly effective at changing my outlook on each year by creating massive cognitive dissonance. I think that all I do is work, and yet, there was plenty of leisure. I think that money is tight, and yet, there was plenty of luxury. I can’t help but conclude that life is great.

Crazy Good Travel
Last year I held off on writing the list so that I could include Egypt. Turns out that this list didn’t suffer from that decision at all.
1. Went to Prague with Sarah’s brother and his family. Great modern art.
2. Went to Montreal for a conference. Smoked meat sandwich from Schwartz’s Deli.
3. Summer weekend in Tahoe with my Mom, Eggs, Sarah. Eggs learned to swim.
4. Vancouver to visit my brother. Three variations on Eggs Benedict.
5. Chicago. A graduation present to my sister.
6. Egypt revisited: knowing people there made the Egyptian revolution much more riveting.

Food
7. Per Se. The 9th best restaurant in the world. Believable.
8. Discovered Dynamo Donuts. At least one offering each day is transcendent.
9. Ran our Hot Cross Buns competition. Despite electronic voting, still managed to screw Sarah out of the victory. Oops.

Conferences
10. Web 2.0 Expo. Highest quality of breakout sessions I’ve ever encountered at a conference.
11. PCMA Educon. My event-nerd friends.
12. Web 2 Summit. Reconnected with old friends turned keynote speakers.

Writing
13. Experiments in Software Services
14. Lessons on deliberate practice from Jerry Rice
15. Two tips for deliberate practice
16. What is success? Impact.
17. Transparent Pricing
18. 32 Answers on Quora

Went Bicoastal
19. Moved into an apartment in Bernal Heights, San Francisco.
20. Moved into a second apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
21. Built my first piece of furniture, our SF bed frame. Sturdy.
22. Sold off a massive amount of clutter.

Productivity
23. Checked off 8049 todo items.
24. Checked in 551 code commits.
25. Built a personal points system. Immediately became addicted to flossing and taking out the trash.

Read and liked/loved
26. Understanding Comics
27. Book of Basketball
28. Crossing the Chasm
29. Enders Game
30. Founders at Work. (confirmed that all startups are clust****s)
31. Service Included.

Fun
32. Organized Supercross outing. Lasers, jumps, explosions.
33. Watched all five seasons of Friday Night Lights.
34. Very enjoyable movies: Exit Through the Gift Shop, Zombieland, The Messenger, Inception, The Social Network, The Kings Speech
35. Attended game #2 of the World Series. Life long Giants fan.
36. Organized an urban hike through North Beach and Chinatown.
37. Saw Ira Glass at Zellerbach.
38. Saw Pop-Up Magazine at Herbst.
39. Took up swimming. Haven’t drowned yet.
40. Played and loved Mass Effect 2.
41. Accompanied a vampire to Wondercon.

Work
42. Launched CrowdVine conference website platform.
43. Launched one-on-one meetings for CrowdVine.
44. Attendee growth: 68% more attendees than 2009.
45. Had massive January: 2x more business than any previous month.
46. Started article series on Conference Website Design.
47. Appeared on the #1 Meetings Podcast, aptly named Meetings Podcast.
48. Launched Social Workshop.
49. Worked with an amazing designer, Armando Sosa. Will take me all year to launch his designs.
50. Launched IHeartQuotes update: new design, Tumblr, Facebook.
51. @iheartquotes picked up 300k followers.
52. Recruited second designer/developer with huge upside. Announcement later.
53. Broke ground on yak.ms.

Bonus: Sarah and I celebrated six years together. This year I got to participate in several of her successes. She graduated from Haas School of Business with an MBA. And her conference, Web 2.0 Expo, was really the best web conference I’ve ever been to. I’m looking forward to doing many interesting things together this year.

It’s been about 164 weeks since I stopped working for other people and started working on my own ideas. I check in once a year to see how things are going and to see if I can identify at least one highlight for each week.

Of course, I never manage to actually check in on the exact anniversary, so the first check-in covered 53 weeks and 53 Things. The next year covered 56 Things. And for this year, I’ve got 55 items covering the last 55 weeks.

I’m especially glad to look at the list because it changed my outlook for the year. Like a lot of people, I thought 2009 was a hard, awful, disappointing year. But now that I’ve made the list I think it was probably my best year ever.

Crazy good travel
1. Found out what the Sistine Chapel smells like (Will Hunting, not much) and other Italian adventures.
2. Held off on writing this post so that I could include Egypt.
3. A #pizzaquest spanning SF to Phoenix to NYC (di fara’s is still the best)
4. Two and a half months in NYC (West Village and Fort Greene)

More CrowdVine growth
5. Revenue up 50%
6. Basically stopped doing hard development, system administration, account management, and support because Jay and Terrie do it better (thanks!)
7. Figured out what a B2B “solution” is. (It’s software, hosting, a Terrie)
8. Introduced session ratings feature
9. New Themes and Designs
10. First A/B tests
11. Third-party registration integration (EventBrite, RegOnline, Laser)
12. Wrote an elevator pitch (didn’t seem to come up before, now it comes up all the time)
13. Added Twitter auth and Friendfeed style commenting
14. Added content management features
15. First all hands meeting

Inspiration via voice rather than text
16. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg on personal scaling
17. The idea of Internet Treasures via Mark Pincus on Stanford’s ECorner
18. Geoffrey Moore at Business of Software Conference (some people have tricks from last year, he has fundamentals that have held since the 70′s)

And more inspiration from conferences
19. Business of Software (already mentioned) was a must for any software entrepreneur
20. VTM: Web Design conference
21. PCMA gave clarity to our approach and direction in the conference business.

Lotta writing
22. The Real Lessons from Twitter
23. Things I don’t get (about the event industry)
24. Desiging the ultimate contact form in Rails
25. Top 100 event twitter accounts
26. Some Notes on NDAs
27. AirBnB – Good cheap housing for conference attendees
28. Conference Twitter Report
29. Declining OpenID usage
30. Linux on the desktop

Family
31. We were in the NYT Again!
32. Sarah’s now the General Manager and Co-chair for Web 2.0 Expo
33. Two new nephews, Jack Ozro on Sarah’s side and Parker on my side
34. Saw Sarah’s sister-in-law rock the SF Fringe festival
35. I tech-reviewed Sarah’s The Twitter Book (didn’t require any feedback, really)

Productivity hacks
36. My todo list shows 7500 items completed over the last 55 weeks!
37. Started a journal (which made pulling this list together much easier)
38. Started hanging up politely
39. No laptops between 6-10pm

Lived a bit (like the travel wasn’t enough)
40. Saw a lot of movies, six good, Inglorious Basterds, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, District 9, Food Inc., Where the Wild Things Are
41. Loved Whip It
42. And Watchmen
43. Really loved archival footage of old San Francisco from the Prelinger Archives
44. Road the Tour de Vino with my mom
45. Attended WonderCon (Wow!)
46. Played Omaha High Low for the first time
48. Live reenactment of the movie Point Break (with Keanu actor chosen from the audience)
49. Played and loved Dragon Age
50. Got a haircut from Marco, claims to have cut Regis’ hair in the 80s.

Read some actual books
51. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American
52. Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Live

Misc experiences
53. Organized moderators for @iheartquotes
54. Made a killer pomelo sorbet
55. First time brining meat (chicken for the smoker)

Bonus
56. I usually end with a big thank you to my partner Sarah. The last two years have had big thanks for helping get CrowdVine off the ground and there was more of that this year–great advice and notably, a strong introduction to the work of Steve Blank and Eric Reis. But what really stands out is how much of the non-work items have her finger prints on it. This is the year where we introduced some work life balance (by balance I mean holding equally heavy weights in each hand) and so many of the highlights were sparked by her. Thank you!

Welcome to 2009. The new year means it’s been a little more than two years, 109 weeks actually, since I started working for myself. When I passed my first anniversary, I wrote up a post of 53 highlights from the first 53 weeks. My goals for going independent were to bring something useful to the world, to have personal growth, and to have a better life. How’d that go over the last 56 weeks?

Built up CrowdVine
1. New design and logo.
2. Brought Michelle, Farley, and Chris in to help with web production, design, development, and sales.
3. Doubled our customers in the first half of the year and then doubled again in the second half.
4. Launched self-service conference version.
5. Really beefed up our calendar (icalico) integration.
6. Mobile conference version.
7. OpenID support (consumption).
8. Third party address book integration (Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn, vCard, CSV, Yahoo, Hotmail).
9. Private messaging (this seems so basic now).
10. Twitter integration and aggregation.

Experienced being the biz guy
11. Exhibited at my first trade show (never again).
12. Exhibited at my second trade show (really, this isn’t for me).
13. Setup Quickbooks (kind of fun)
14. The emotion went out of saying no (or hanging up). Thanks George.

Got some press
15. I was in the New York Times.
16. HyveUp did a video interview.
17. Regular Expression Pocket Reference 2nd Edition got a Slashdot review (9/10)

Gave back a bit
18. Co-chaired the Web2Open unconference
19. Invented a type of conference session (Speed QA)
20. Gave my social networking for everyone talk to SCWD and CalSAE
21. Open-sourced our XSS protection, sanitize_params
22. Open-sourced our highrise_to_campfire notifier

Wrote some things that I’m proud of
23. Take the next step, Paul
24. CrowdVine vs. Ning
25. Five tips for adding an unconference track
26. Deliberate practice
27. Passively Updated Microblogging for Business
28. Two Good Things

Read some books
29. Warren Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
30. Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle
31. Born Standing Up, the Steve Martin autobiography

Got deep into deliberate practice
32. Started a no laptopping after 10pm rule (lasted until at least Jan 13, but I read three books in that period)
33. Deliberate practice journal (I’ll write this up)
34. Lawyer-style todo/just-did lists, i.e. very small items that get timestamped when I’m done
35. Stopped wasting time on the web. My work computer blocks: espn.com, huffingtonpost.com, talkingpointsmemo.com, sfgate.com, gamespot.com, slashdot.org, boingboing.net, newmogul.com, bloglines.com, cnn.com, techcrunch.com, crunchgear.com, news.ycombinator.com
36. Moved all non-essential feeds from google reader to bloglines and then blocked bloglines on my work computer.
37. Automated positive reinforcement with Campfire notifications on completion of tasks.
38. Started using OpenID (just one of many examples of improved practices).

Managed to still live a bit
39. Played and loved Fallout 3.
40. Did a month long house swap in NYC.
41. Spent a week in Hawaii.
42. Lost in the first round of Beer Pong Weekend.
43. Played my first game of werewolf.
44. Started listening to podcasts again.
45. Grew out my hair.
46. Saw many movies but only loved Man on Wire.
47. And IronMan.
48. Went Snowshoeing with friends and our dogs.
49. Started Blawg-and-order to chronicle our life-long quest to watch every episode of every law and order series in order. The blog looks stagnant, but we are going to complete this.
50. Learned how to shoot a basketball (I got as far as varsity summer-league with a release that had a lot of thumb).

Bought some things that worked out well
51. iphone (you’re allowed to like your cellphone now?)
52. quad-core from Dell
53. 24″ monitor

Spent a lot of time with some webservices that rock
54. Glance, simple reliable service for screen sharing.
55. Wesabe, love seeing all of my accounts in one place.

Also
56. Again, I accepted enormous amounts of behind the scenes support from my partner, Sarah. She’s a minor investor and major advisor for CrowdVine, co-chaired the Web2Open and co-created the SpeedQA idea, has agreed to my nutty law and order idea (and coined the name Blawg-and-Order), does way more of the household logistical work, plus has her own extremely interesting life and work.

Last week my last employer celebrated their one year launch anniversary. That means this week is my 53 week anniversary since going solo. My goals were to start a company that I wanted to work for and to spend more time doing interesting things. So, here’s 53 things that happened over the last 53 weeks:

Self-funded a company through contracting

1. Recorded my first screencast (using Camtasia Studio).
2. Three Salesforce articles.
3. Learned agile from the product management side and led a series of agile adoptions in the corporate world.
4. Second edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference.
5. Performed a technical due diligence for an acquiring company.
6. Led technology transfer of Odeo to their new owners.

Built a company

7. Built CrowdVine.com (682 code commits).
8. Formed an LLC.
9. Found a business model (networking services for conferences).
10. Got my first paying customer.
11. Got shat on by a bird while closing my first big deal.
12. Convinced someone to work with me.
13. Wrote the company values (Bias for action. Solve valuable problems. Love self-improvement).
14. Got my first adsense check.
15. Got my first repeat business.

Learned something about silicon valley

16. Presented to (but didn’t pitch) my friends at CRV.
17. Talked to someone at Sequoia (wicked smart).
18. Met with a big company about acquisition.
19. Read True North and realized it was ok to say no to both investment and exit strategies.

Read some good books

20. Snowcrash.
21. Cryptonomicon (should have read both 10 years ago)
22. Read The China Study and went mostly vegan.
23. Read The Game and learned there’s a big difference between first base and a real relationship.
24. The very dated Designing Web Usability (did you know Netflix used to be blue?).

Got involved in some conferences

25. Sat on my second Web 2.0 panel (but first time that I really participated)
26. Attended my 5th Foo Camp (also the first time I really participated).
27. Ran CrowdVines for SoCon, Maker Faire, FooCamp, BIF3, MX East, FOWA London, and Web 2.0 Expo.
28. Made some great friends in Atlanta.

Spent some time with my hobbies

29. Started Urban Hiking.
30. Found a Vegas poker game that I could hang with (the Flamingo).
31. Learned positive (anti-Cesar Millan) dog training techniques.
32. Shaped a dog trick (shaping is how dolphins get trained).
33. Officiated a wedding.
34. Smoked a turkey.

Switched

35. From MT to WordPress (thrilled).
36. From OS X laptop to pre-installed Ubuntu laptop (thanks System76)
37. From crappy server providers to a great one (thanks ServerBeach)
38. From phone to smart phone (so-so 8525)
39. From crappy car to the best car ever (thanks Scion).

Got involved with PR and Marketing

40. Wrote 73 posts here and 8 more on the CrowdVine blog.
41. Quoted in the NYT and the LA Times (about Twitter).
42. First video interview.
43. Wrote my first press release (which led to a TechCrunch story).
44. Got a story on the front page of Netscape (now Propeller). Took one week.
45. Got a story on the front page of Digg. Took two weeks. Key was the title.

Became a better developer

46. CSS skills went from a 1 to a 5 (out of 10).
47. Made my first logo in Photoshop.
48. Contributed to open source (XSS plugin, OpenSocial, and soon to release icalico).

Business partners

49. Integrated with Pathable for FOO and FOWA
50. Integrated with icalico for FOO and FOWA
51. Learned how to quickly end a call or delete an email from an inappropriate biz dev inquiry (“May I speak to the marketing department?” “No.”).
52. Responded to three requests for me to co-found someone else’s company. Flattered once. Disgusted twice.

Also

53. Accepted enormous amounts of help from my partner, Sarah. She was a sounding board, cheerleader, author of some of our marketing copy, and even convinced her group to do market research on CrowdVine for a Berkeley MBA group project.