the underlying theme.

A list of things I did in 2009, in roughly chronological order:
Wrote Mafia Wars for iPhone at Zynga. This was an intense project - from initial 1-page proposal to submission to Apple in 7 weeks. I worked with an amazing team of designers, product managers, artists, and serverside coders - everyone at Zynga is so passionate and motivated and hard-working.

Met and fell in love with Timothy Fitz. Was maid-of-honor in my best friend Christina and her husband Philip’s wedding. 

Attended conferences: SXSWi, GDC, WWDC, C4, and 360idev. 

Gave a talk at the 360idev (iPhone development conference) in Denver titled “Getting started in iPhone Game Development” with co-presenter David Cairns. Photo. Slides. Wrote an iPhone game called TwitterGame (demo movie) (source code) which connects to Twitter and pulls your feed down to create platforms for you to jump on, and you can “star” your friends’ tweets. We didn’t release this to the store, but instead wrote it as a teaching tool for our talk at 360idev.

iPhoneDevCamp3 - on a team with @schwa, @ejoep, and @augustjoki, we created an iPhone app called AvatarWall which displayed the Twitter avatars of several hundred people, across an ad-hoc network grid of several phones, in rainbow ordering.  Whenever a person in the display tweeted, their avatar would animate like app downloads on the App Wall at WWDC09.  We won the prize for “Coolest App”. Played a show with the band Delivery is Possible at the venue Amnesia.  I sang, played keyboards and controlled the drum machine.  Working with these guys and exploring my own latent musical talent was so much fun.

Went to South Africa - went on safari, went shark cage diving, and hung out in Cape town. Pics. Had lots of long- and short-term visitors at my house, so I named it “Hotel Commanda” on foursquare.

Met a ton of truly amazing people who have each inspired me in so many ways.  The NSCoder SF crew, many people in the Mac developer community, tons of SF tech people.  There are too many influential people to name. Worked on PetVille at Zynga.  Coming straight from iPhone development, running network operations for this game was like being thrown into the deep end and learning to swim.

It wasn’t all great things - the year had some shittiness too. In November, I had the swine flu, followed by pneumonia. I spent the first few months of 2009 being fucked up about a break-up with a boy. After that, I dated someone who was not very nice, but quickly got out of that. 

All things considered, this year was A++ good fun, definitely would repeat.