The personal report for the previous year, which was 2015, is available here…

Generally, I feel, that from the IT point of view this year was a failure. Like the previous one… I should really do something with this in the next years. Anyway…

Achievements in 2016

Here are some of my achievements in 2016:

• In this year, on July 4, we released new Kayako. In fact, it’s a complete rewrite of the system. Everything was changed – from the user interface to the way, the product is used by customers (e.g., no download option is available any longer). Certainly, it’s a result of a very hard work of many kayakers, including me. Thus, I personally worked on the API service and documentation. More details about the new product of Kayako can be found here.
• As it was mentioned in the previous report, I got a suggestion from Packt Publishing to update my book about Redmine. As a result, the second edition of the Mastering Redmine book was published in May, 2016. I believe, this edition is much better than the first one. The new book can be bought on the Packt Publishing website here (or on Amazon).
  • The sample project, which is described in the book (and which is, actually, about writing the book), is live this time. So, it’s a web site, that I launched this year. Using it you can check, how the book was written, play with the pages, screenshots of which you can see in the book, submit errata and ask questions, and more. You can find it at Mastering-Redmine.com.
• On October 30, 2015 my younger daughter Veronica was born (so now I have two daughters). Like with the senior daughter Anastasia, I was present at her birth as well. Now, Veronica is almost a year old (actually, she will be in 3 days).
• A month before publishing this report I finally upgraded AndriyLesyuk.com (this website). Before this, I finally succeeded to update my plugins, so they could work under Redmine 2.5.xd (this way I name the version of Redmine in Debian stable, which is actually very close to Redmine 3.0). I just could not upgrade my server without updating the plugins, that I use. Not a great achievement considering, that Debian jessie was released on April 26, 2015 and Debian’s Redmine “3.0” was created on August 25, 2014, but…
• I have already mentioned in my previous reports, that I have a disease, that does not let me, e.g., to attend office (I work from home). Since this year I’m trying a new treatment method. The result is far from being impressive, but it already allowed me to have a vacation on the sea for the first time in approximately 10 years. So, it’s definitely an achievement for me (while absolutely normal for the vast majority of people).

Failures in 2016

Unfortunately, my failures in 2016 are much more serious in terms of IT:

• While I’m working on this right now, my plugins are still not up-to-date (while, probably, some of them already work well under Redmine 3.3 – I’m just not sure (enough) yet). This becomes a permanent problem, so I’m thinking about supporting less versions of Redmine and abandoning some of the plugins.
• The similar applies to my WordPress plugins and to my Redmine/WordPress integration solution. Most of these tools were not released already for years, while they actually function quite well. Luckily, new versions of WordPress do not seem to break the work of my plugins…
• My Orangutan project was not yet revived. And, I still plan to do this (even started doing this last year). I would abandon it, but I still really need it. Now, I’m planning to extend the Redmine’s monkey for Orangutan, so it would not need to run any SQL queries directly.
• #MyNotStartupProject is another my project, that waits in my pool for years. This is an idea, that I really want to implement and which is really needed by people, so I still plan to resume my work on it.