Here’s what the year of 2014 looked like for me.
I have a thing for resolutions but I’ve decided to keep my personal goals elsewhere. So this is just a chance to capture some of the professional successes I had in 2014 and to be thankful for them.
- I assessed what I learned from helping in the early days with now closed hyperlocal site NEast Philly [January]
- I spoke about media pitching at MIT and Ice T spoke after me [February]
- I won a second term as a Pen and Pencil Club board member [February]
- I finished paying down my student loans. [March]
- Phillymag called Philly Tech Week an institution [April]
- We put together an even more inclusive Philly Tech Week [April]
- I testified before City Council on the tech sector [April]
- I led a keynote Q&A of Twitter cofounder Biz Stone at the Free Library [May]
- An essay of mine on technology adoption was anthologized [May]
- I led the fundraising for and official launch of Technical.ly Delaware [June]
- I joined the board of the Workshop School, a project-based alternative high school in Philadelphia that I have reported on. [June]
- We brought 10 of us together for our Technical.ly team retreat in the Poconos for whitewater rafting and paintball [June]
- I keynoted the RAIN conference on incubation spaces [July]
- Obamacare more than doubled our company healthcare costs, and I managed it [August]
- I was part of another great Baltimore Innovation Week [September]
- I joined the board of Coded by Kids, an after-school software programing program. More on that here.
- I celebrated three years organizing the local Online News Association meetup [October]
- I helped organize Rise, the first conference by Technical.ly that had speakers and attendees from all five of our markets [October]
- I joined an advisory committee for a Digital Marketing masters degree from Temple University [October]
- I liked this interview with and report I wrote on Aol cofounder and DC-based investor Steve Case. [October]
- I led a keynote Q&A of SAP CEO Bill McDermott for the imPACT conference [November]
- The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce named me ‘Young Entrepreneur of the Year’ [November]
- I was flown to Qatar by Aljazeera to mentor their first international media hackathon [December]
- I wrote a thorough piece on the City of Philadelphia’s much maligned wage tax. [December]
- We hosted 25 at our Technical.ly All-Team Day [December]
I kept up a lot of writing here, and I also did some reporting for all of our five Technical.ly markets. I also happened to get engaged, and I officially went car-less.