It’s that time of year again where we look back at what happened over the past 12 months. Obviously this is mostly an excuse for me to look at the photos I’ve taken over the year and share some of them as I’ve done previously.

I attended a lot of conferences this year, though one thing that was different this year was that I attended more than I spoke at. I also spoke at a lot of user groups which was lots of fun.

January

At the very end of January I went to FOSDEM and for the first time ever, I was accompanied by my wife who is currently studying for a degree in computing.

February

I spoke at the PHPUK conference in February and have some good memories from this event.

March

I stepping into the unknown in March and attended a WordCamp! It was a good experience and I got a new scarf!

April

In April, my friend Alex visited from the Antipodes so I went up to Leeds to meet up with her and other friends. I discovered Fluxx the board game last year when at OSCON, and this was the time that I first played Fluxx the card game. I also visited Glasgow to speak at the PHP user group which was a bit of trek, so I took a couple of days off and photographed railways in the North of England while I was up that way.

May

May is the month of birthdays in our household. We visited the Happy Potter studios in Leavesden to celebrate! I also visited Belgrade, Serbia to speak at SOLIDday.

June

Seeing friends was the highlights of June.

July

July was the inaugural PHP South Coast conference and the first time that 19FT has sponsored a conference. Very well organised first event and I’m looking forward to the 2016 edition.

August

August is all about holiday! While in Spain this year, I tried to take a good sunrise picture.

September

In one trip, I spoke at PHP Hampshire in Portsmouth and then attended the Lead Developer conference in London. Lead Developer was different type of conference and I’m going to be attending again this year.

October

October was the month of two fantastic conferences when I spoke at PHPNW in Manchester and attended OSCON Europe in Amsterdam! The hackathon at PHPNW particularly notable for joind.in as we received many pull requests! I also met my cousin’s new twin daughters which was another highlight of a very enjoyable month.

November

November is Fireworks Night in the UK which we celebrated with friends. I also went to Washington for the php[world] conference. It’s always good see boundaries between different PHP communities being broken down.

December

The final month of the year found me in a pub with some of my oldest Internet friends: We’ve been playing MMOPRGs since 1999 and are suitably irreverent around each other! I also spoke at the first meeting of the PHPMiNDS user group in Nottingham and we released Slim Framework 3!

Looking back, I have had a really good 2015 and have some very fond memories; Let’s see what 2016 brings!

2014 is coming to an end, so as usual, let’s look back at the year as highlighted by the photos that I’ve taken. This year, I took at least one photo every day, so there’s been plenty for me to choose from!

January

As usual, there was flooding in Worcester, but clearly the biggest personal event of the month was breaking my elbow while skateboarding with my son at the end of the month. This clearly impacted my business for February and March as I could barely type for a good six or so weeks.

February

My wife and I celebrated her birthday in Barcelona and we discovered Licor 43!

March

A quiet month where my cast was removed. I also attended the PHPNE 14 conference in Newcastle.

April

In April, we went to the Insomnia Gaming Festival where the kids got to test out new games. We also sold our caravan.

May

May is a month of birthdays as both kids and myself celebrate.

June

The highlights of June were watching Great Britain play Belgium at basketball (and win!) and attending DPC.

July

I was very pleased to speak at OSCON in Portland! It’s an amazing conference and I would very much like to go to the European edition in Amsterdam next year.

August

In August, I went on holiday with my family and, at the end of the month, we celebrated my cousin’s marriage.

September

I attended and presented at the inaugural Endpoint conference where I learned much from Ben Longden. I also attended the Hackference conference day which was filled with interesting content.

October

By October, I was heavily into conference season and presented at both PHPNW and ZendCon. Sandwiched between them, I also attended the All Your Base conference. This month, we also bought our own squat rack and cancelled our gym membership.

November

I was privileged to be be invited to speak at PHP Argentina! An very well organised conference with a number of well known community people that I was delighted to meet and spend time with. How can you not love a conference where there are deck chairs in the hallway track? I also attended PHPEM’s unconference; It turns out that I have opinions on how to give a good talk too! This was a good event and I hope they hold it again next year.

December

My eldest son finished building his remote control car kit this month. This was a great project and very enjoyable. At the close of the year, I bought a new camera, so I expect that I’ll be taking lots of photos next year too!

I’m looking forward to 2015!

As 2013 finishes, I continue my tradition of showing off some photos that recap my year. Last year I discovered that I didn’t take many photos at all, so this year I’ve published at least one photo every day! A lot of them were rubbish, but a good number are shots that I’m very pleased with.

January

It rained in January. I liked this picture of Worcester racecourse:

January also saw me visiting Belgium for the PHPBenelux conference, where I took a very good picture of Chris Hartjes:

February

February was a quiet month, with the highlight of visiting our friend in Swansea. There was also a history event in Worcester which the kids enjoyed:

March

We had snow in March which seemed a little late in the year. Also, Tornado came to Worcester, so I got a photo!

April

I started Nineteen Feet in April. This was the month when creating paper models of Minecraft items became a thing in our household:

May

in May, I returned to the excellent php[tek] conference where we celebrated Liam’s birthday:

June

By June I realised that I really need a desk as I was now working full time at home!

July

The highlight of this month was a trip to the National Railway Museum in York to take photos of some A4s:

August

In August, we go on holiday and this year we went to Devon. It was surprisingly warm who was nice. The highlight was a trip to the aquarium, but I also got to go on a train!

September

September was the start of a busy traveling time for me. In September, I went to pfCongres followed by a trip to Colombia to consult for a client. I particularly liked Michelle’s talk on open source:

October

In October, I spoke at the fantastic PHPNW conference. During the hackathon the new version of joind.in’s Android app was released by Rich. The talks were really good as usual and I was not the only one who paid attention in Ross’ talk on models:

November

I went to two conferences in Novemeber: CodeConnexx and ZendCon Europe where I got my hands on a Red Elephpant!

December

I visited Colombia for a followup visit with my client which was great fun. The team introduced me to Aguardiente:

My company also did well enough to allow me to purchase a new retina MacBook Pro and monitor which arrived in the last few days to round off a very good year!

As another year draws to a close, I continue my tradition of showing off some photos that recap our year.

January

January 2012 was a quiet month. I released Daily Jotter 1.3 and started using Sublime Text as my editor of choice for programming. Photographically, the highlight of the month was the Worcester Flickr Group’s scavenger hunt.

February

It snowed in Feburary and I started publishing articles on ZF2. Again, a Worcester Flickr Group outing to the Panorama Tower, Croome D’abitot in Worcestershire provided the only interesting photographs that I took all month.

March

I was very much into Instagram and didn’t take any photos with my DSLR this month!

April

In April, I went to the inaugural Whisky Web conference as an attendee, which was fun, especially as Josh used one of my photos in his keynote.

May

Both sons have their birthdays in May and a big family get together were the highlights of my May.

June

Nick and Kerry were married this month.

July

A quiet month. I visited the PHPNW user group to see Jenni’s first talk.

August

In August we went to the Isle of Wight on holiday and I managed to visit the steam railway.

September

Eldest’s first day at high school!

October

October saw me speak at both the PHPNW and ZendCon conferences. I gave a tutorial with Evan Coury at both events which seem to be appreciated by the attendees.

Whilst in California, I managed to take a photo of the Golden Gate bridge.

November

After the busyness of October’s travel, I had a quiet month in Worcester. I also got some Toyella business cards!

December

Last month of the year and the last month that my company’s offices were in Birmingham as we moved to Worcester for the start for 2013. There was also a lot of rain!

All in all, another pretty good year. Next year, I intend to take more photos with my DSLR though.

As I did last year, I thought I’d continue my tradition of showing off some photos that recap our year.

January

PHPBNL 2011 happened in January. Also, my Mac OS X application, Daily Jotter was released onto the Mac App Store.

February

The first PHPucEU happened in Manchester which was great fun and, of course, the PHPUK conference in London. The biggest news for us though, was that we moved house in February!

March

I went to Canada for the rather excellent Confoo conference and watched a snowball fight!

April

A relaxed month after 3 months of conferences and a house move. There was a Royal wedding in the UK which resulted in a lot of merchandising!

May

May was the busiest month ever. Both sons have their birthdays in May and DPC in Amsterdam and php|tek in Chicago are back to back conferences! So many good photographs this month, but I have gone with this one of Jeremy Kendall as he took many excellent photographs at tek!

June

Our trip to the zoo this year was in June when we went to Twycross Zoo.

July

We went to the beach in July.

August

In August we went to the Fleet Air Arm Museum.

September

Jon achieved his Grade 1 classical guitar certification this month.

We also went to a friend’s wedding.

October

October saw the very excellent PHPNW conference return for its forth year and I was very glad to be asked to do a ZF2 tutorial which seemed to go well.

November

November was the month that John Arnold held his creativityex project. I particularly liked my effort for negative space:

December

Last month of the year and as part of the Worcester Flickr group, I got to take a photograph in a studio!

All in all, a pretty good year. One interesting thing I did notice was that I have a lot more good photos sitting in Aperture than I published. I think this is because Aperture is so slow to use on my old Macbook Pro. I was better at publishing photos with Capture NX2 and I thought that was slow; Clearly it wasn’t that bad!

Another year is over, so I get to show off some photos that recap the year!

January

We started the year with a visit to the zoo!

There was also snowy weather last January and on the last day of the month, we put our house on the market. We would be accepting an offer on it in late October.

February

In February, I took pictures of canal boats.

The PHPUK conference was also in February, where I presented a session about Windows Azure and PHP.

March

I took my best picture yet of Worcester cathedral.

April

April was all about my wife! She had her first tatoo done.

and spent some time in hospital having her appendix removed

May

The big event in May was php|tek. I struggled to find a single picture that captured the conference for me, but went for this one.

June

June saw another conference: DPC in Amsterdam.

This photo of Chris Shiflett was also popular:

July

Photographically, the main source of all my photos was my aunt and uncle’s 40th wedding anniversary, of which I haven’t published any of the photos :)

August

I took the kids to the Severn Valley Railway in August, but the main event was our friends’ wedding!

September

September saw the inaugural PHPSW meeting in Bristol.

I also tried to take a photo of a glass of red wine with a white background. This proved to be much harder than I expected

October

The Severn Valley Railway’s autumn gala was held in October

October also saw the fantastic PHPNW conference come back to Manchester.

November

I tried my hand at photographing fireworks

December

The snow really fell in December. So much so that we had to abandon a trip to London having travelled 13 miles in 6 hours.

Mitchel and Rachel married yesterday and we were invited! Jon and Ben were pageboys with Jon also acting as ring bearer and got to carry the rings in and give them to the best man. The kids looked so cute in their suits!

Rachel looked stunning in her dress. They both gave a speech at dinner; Rachel’s was very emotional and I’m not sure that there was a dry eye in the house by the end of it. It was an excellent day and we wish Mitchell and Rachel the best in their new life together.

The new washing machine arrived today. It’s an LG and very electronic. Every time you touch any knob or button, it beeps or plays a tune!

Our AEG washer-dryer died last night. Rather spectacularly it blew all the fuses whilst I was on a conference call to America…

Today we’re buying a new LG. We went to the local retail parks to view washer-dryers at Currys, Comet and Apollo 2000, but they were so much more expensive than buying from dixons.co.uk. Hence, we came back home and bought over the Internet. I can see that over time, retail shops will become less and less relevant.

Whilst Jon was at a party today, I went down to the river and took these pictures of seagulls. I took around 70 photos in order to get these three!

I’m really pleased with all three.