So 2010 is almost over and 2011 is almost here. Another year have gone by. First thing first:

Happy New Year everyone :) Here as part of my audio visualization journey made Musical Fireworks, enjoy(click picture to see it):

Year summary

And now to summarize on how things went this year for me. Wanted to collect in one place where I was at the beginning and where I am now and for now not precisely but say where I want to go next year.

Work

Little bit longer then a year I am working at innoWate nad am programming Flash games for social networks like Facebook and Vkontakte.

It was rich in experience year:

  • I participated in making two social games directly and helping indirectly in making few others
  • Learned pretty much about social network APIs that are mostly inspired by Facebook
  • Learned about many Flash bugs, inconsistencies, performance issues and some workarounds for them

That are good parts :)   Now some stats

On 12 Aprila of 2010 I installed Procastitracker at work, this software allows me to see how much time I spend in what applications so what we have there:

  • 170 working days since April, two weeks of vacation in August, seems about right
  • 1414 working hours over those 170 days

That makes something like 8 hours 20 minutes of average working time per day or 54 hours of overtime…

In what applications it was spent:

  • 535 hours spent in Firefox
  • 356 hours spent in Flash Builder 4
  • 176 hours spent in SkyPe
  • 82 hours spent in Flash Player
  • 54 hours spent in Windows Explorer (files/folders stuff)
  • 36 hours spent in Flash CS5
  • 27 hours spent in Chrome, lately FF become very bad for Flash development, hangs, crashes, lags, few times tried to switch but FF extensions equivalents in Chrome  are not on par yet
  • 25 hours spent in FTP manager
  • 7 hours in Procastritracker itself :)

You can see I missed some things here and there + there are things where Procastitracker does not know what I was using. Still I covered 90% of things I guess. So yeah 500+ hours or more then 1/3 of my time is spent in browser, Procastitracker is smart enough to see on which sites too:

  • 74 hour on Facebook, testing our stuff, checking competitors stuff, communicating with friends etc
  • 62 hour in Vkontakte one of biggest Russian social networks(there are few), mostly testing our games and working with their API
  • 49 hour on Google sites, gmail, reader, statistics tools and google  search itself, soon I guess chrome store will become a portion of it too
  • 38 hour on DeviantArt, well that’s mostly entertainment stuff, checking works, communicating etc
  • 25 hour on private work related sites, various tools, statistics and game deployment tools
  • 20 hour on One(local social network), entertainment too, local network, photos, friends, communication too
  • 18 hour on Mail.ru, rather new social network from most popular Russian email provider, big player in social arena now too, also testing games and stuff
  • 12 hour Odnoklassniki.ru, probably biggest and oldest Russian social network, also worst API in industry, site too, unstable, user unfriendly, really hard to test and use as platform, but also with most active players community it seems
  • 10 hour YouTube, hehe :)
  • 7 hour in my blog here :)
  • 4 hour Wikipedia, hmm seems small

It is roughly 60% of spent time in FF, there are a lot of small sites and Procastitracker does not allow to group the efficiently so I have no idea on what kind of stuff rest of time was spent.

Activity on DeviantArt

  • Submitted 15 works which 40% less then year back
  • Also comments and views fell something like 50%

I really like DeviantArt and its community, sadly DA is stagnating, especially on Flash front. I wonder if at some point they will provide APIs so that people could start creating art related tools around DA platform. In meantime Flash programmers community is weak there, we lack gallery supervisor and position is open, what that means is that there is no one to be a buffer between DA staff and Flash creators community, Flash deviations do not get to Daily Deviation page (front page, best works of the day, nominated by gallery supervisors)  and also community is disorganized. Sad…

This blog

In first half of this year I registered a hosting and domain name, on 17 April I finished with blog preparations and made my first blogpost here. For long wanted personal, customizable blog that is not dependent/hosted on any social or blogging  platform.

  • Since then I made 54 post
  • There are 33 comments(some are mine in response to other comments)
  • I got something like ~5000  unique visits, 27k of visits overall (AwStats)
  • Those visits eat ~1.3Gb of traffic making it something like 37Kb per visit :)
  • Also I made PingMap and collected ~2k of unique ip pings to my blog so far
  • Also Akismet blocked 239 spam comments :)

Conclusions

Speaking of work, can’t say I am satisfied on many levels… Its a long talk and I will save it for different time but in short, each celebration in the world is a rush to make new features by that deadline. Planing is chaotic and I am not sure we have people who know what they are doing on game design side. I my self don’t really get appeal of game that companies like Zynga make. Anyways part of this is chaotic feature adding. And result of it all is hard to manage large projects on inside (feels bad for me as a programmer, I want to do my work well but I just can’t in such circumstances, partially I guess I lack experience but still)  and also games I am not proud of  from the outside…

On DeviantArt I guess I need to be more active but lack time. DA is good place for various things and getting audience for some things. Sad for me that I am degrading a little in my activity on DA.

On this blog side, I am more or less satisfied. I did not wrote as much as I would have liked, I have like 10-20 unfinished drafts for posts. Also my post quality is not very good. Bad English sometimes and not very deep posts aether. I want this blog to be more clean and useful to people with similar to mine interests but I don’t have time for that aether.

Next year

As you see from above I must say I am not completely satisfied with last year. I want to do a better job and be proud of things I do for a living. I want  to do more blogging and works for DA and with better quality. I am satisfied with what I was doing but now with how. So for next year I wish and want to do better and I do have some things planed to try and do better.

That’s it. Happy New Year!