This is the tenth consecutive year that I’m recording highlights of the previous year. That’s quite a milestone. At the end of August, I will have ten full years of blog posts. A decade of blogging. Hard to believe.

Things sure were different back when I started this blog. Many of us had already been online for a decade or so, but that didn’t translate to getting to know people in the same way it does now. The two decades I’ve spent online have been very different. The first did not feel lacking in any way, but in retrospect, The Web was much more read-only back then. When I think of the Web now, it feels much more participatory and much more engaging. I like that.

If I narrow my focus and examine the most recent decade in isolation, I don’t get the same sense of optimism. I don’t want to get too off-topic, however, so I’ll just let Anil Dash talk about that.

Here are a few of my highlights from 2012:

• I spoke at Boston PHP, which was my first talk in a long time.
• We experimented with Brooklyn Beta being more than just a conference by mentoring and investing in five startups. It was a lot of work, but very rewarding.
• My friends and I made a tool to check if your LinkedIn password was leaked. We called it LeakedIn, and it was big on the Internet for a day.
• Analog and Fictive Kin merged. :-)
• I co-organized a third Brooklyn Beta and the first Beyond Beta, a dense schedule of events taking place all over New York during the week of Brooklyn Beta.
• I attended Build for the first time. This was also my first time in Northern Ireland.
• I spoke at Beyond Tellerrand for the first time.
• I spoke at Inspire for the first time.

Despite good reasons to not set goals, I do want to set a few simple ones. If nothing else, this list can serve as a personal reminder. My goals for this year include:

• Write more. This was a goal for 2012, and I did not live up to my expectations.
• Learn more. I learned Python and JavaScript in 2012, but I’m not an expert in either. I need more practice.
• Do more. This is vague and personal. As I get older, my ambition grows. I need to be more organized and efficient, so that I can get more done.

I hope you’ve all had a great year. Here’s to a great 2013. :-)