To be honest, 2013 feels like a really good year to me. I was trying to reflect back on what happened, and I compiled a pretty big bullet pointed list (in no particular order at all). (Suzi’s list may be a little incomplete, as I compiled this list by myslef.)

Suzi and I

  • did a 10 day cleanse (we cut out a bunch of food groups, portion control, took some giant pills)
  • visited Chelan (Suzi’s birthday), Leavensworth (gross), Portland (Screen Door, Japanese garden), Vancouver B.C. (Deer Garden), and Chicago (Planetarium, Aquarium, Art Institute)
  • started teaching 3rd grade Sunday school and went to a training seminar (Super Saturday)
  • were a part of our church’s marriage group
  • started being discipled by Pastor Matt
  • hosted a housewarming party (Ezell’s chicken, + waffles)
  • did our quiet times at a different coffeeshop every Saturday morning for a while (eventually settled on Tapioca Express and Kirkland Zoka)
  • went to our church’s retreat about stirring up one another to love and good works
  • played on our church’s worship team and were a part of our church’s first ever Praise Night
  • did the Free Them 5k (our church collectively raised $3400 for World Concern against human trafficking)
  • went to VegFest and Hmong New Year at Seattle Center
  • recorded a song with Frank and Gloria
  • were in the pastor appreciation video (which I just find really amusing)

Suzi

  • started leading girl’s group, going through Beth Moore’s Breaking Free
  • put together 2 baby showers, 2 bridal showers, flowers for Julia’s wedding
  • played with the Seattle Chinese Orchestra at Benaroya Hall
  • established a routine of quiet times and going to the gym
  • picked up Grudem’s Systematic Theology and Adobe Creative Suite online classes
  • became a member of CSBC and planned parties, helped with babysitting, was elected a leadership position for Women’s Discipleship, and coordinated the craft for church’s one-day VBS

I

  • ran the Seattle marathon with Tim
  • switched companies from Amazon to HasOffers
  • was vice captain for our church’s CSL basketball team
  • was a groomsman for Fred and Julia!
  • had massive breakthrough in stopping looking at porn (thank you, Chris)
  • read Generous Justice, Every Good Endeavor, King’s Cross, The Meaning of Marriage (all by Tim Keller), This Momentary Marriage (John Piper), Hole in our Holiness (Kevin DeYoung)
  • was a part of our guy’s Bible study going through John Piper’s When I Don’t Desire God (we also saw NT Wright)
  • memorized a lot of Scripture towards the end of the year by making an effort to memorize a verse a day

(In terms of tech,) I

  • went to the CascadiaJS conference in Vancouver, B.C.
  • released a site called Am I Down using a MEAN stack and was a finalist in AngelHack for MoodMeme
  • gave a lightning talk at a local Angular meetup
  • contributed to AngularJS and released some small side projects (Facebook Utils (easier auth, routing), NgReact (70% improvement using React components))
  • learned a lot about these technologies: Angular, Yeoman, Grunt, Karma, Chai (not Jasmine), Firebase, Bower, npm kinda; used MongoDB, Passport, Twitter Bootstrap 2 and 3; got a lot better at command line, Git, CSS, JS fundamentals; used Sublime Text 2, Hipchat, Adium, Github, JIRA, and a MacBook Pro
  • launched a new version of the CSBC church website
  • launched a new version of davidandsuzi.com via Jekyll, 70% improvement in latency
  • released an NPM module for a Bible API and even unit tested it

Last Year’s Resolutions

At the beginning of the year, I actually set a bunch of New Year’s resolutions, using this site from Donald Miller: http://mysubplot.com/user/dchang

In the end, I did pretty all right with reaching my goals, so I feel pretty happy about it all, though there are still things I missed. Interestingly, I hit all of my goals as a side programmer. I didn’t hit too many of my goals as an employee of Amazon (or at least I don’t remember hitting them), though I was only there for half of the year. My goals under Spiritual Being and Husband were also not the best, though some of my goal setting didn’t make the most sense in retrospect (like “Learn about Hardwood Floors”), but I guess that should shine some light on where my allegience lied and how I need to be intentional to invest even more time into my spiritual walk and to my marriage over this next year.

Regardless, looking forward to 2014. I pray Suzi and I see God continue to transform our own hearts and bring a few specific people to a saving faith in Him. In Him.