Gratitude for 2014

grateful – warmly or deeply appreciative of kindness or benefits received; thankful
gratitude – the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful

2014 was a year of growth, challenges, and humbling experiences which filled me with a lot of gratitude for the opportunities to grow both personally and as a partner of Cheeky Monkey Media.

At the end of 2014, I took the opportunity to take a step back from the day-to-day grind and took a look back at what had been accomplished during the year. At the end of 2013, we had just leased our new office space, laid a new floor and painted, and purchased 3 desks which we placed as far apart as we could humanly get them. The office space was amazingly empty, as the majority of the monkeys all worked remotely, and most were not even in Kelowna. We had only a few clients which were not under NDA’s, to talk about, as we still worked mostly with other Drupal agencies as mercenaries for hire (insert gun noise and helicopters here). All of this made for exciting times, but overall, these were small, incremental changes to what we had been doing for the previous 3 years.

Looking back on 2014 there were a lot of great things which occurred:

• We grew to have 10 people working out of our Kelowna office
• The office became a fun place to be, with some life added in
• We had the opportunity to bring one of our long-time contractors, with his family, up from the United States to call the Okanagan home
• Were selected to build the Drupal Job Boards for the Drupal Association and had a very successful launch
• We won the job to produce all the design elements for 2 future DrupalCons, the first one being DrupalCon LA in May 2015
• We attended more events than we did ever before: DrupalCon Austin 2014, BadCAMP 2014 in San Francisco, Social Media Expo in Las Vegas, and numerous local events in the Okanagan
• Our T-Shirts at DrupalCon Austin created a line up 3 times longer than the one to the open bar on the first night, it was a whirlwind

We had the privilege to work with some great new clients and to continue working with amazing existing clients which resulted in launching a record number of new sites:

• Drupal Job Board – Drupal 7
• San Francisco SPCA – Drupal 7
• Souls Grown Deep – Drupal 7
• SportMedBC – Drupal 7
• Inside Track – Drupal 7

Looking back on 2014, and at the above list of things, reminded me to be grateful for the year we had, and how important it is to take the time to appreciate all of the good things which have been accomplished. Thank you retrospect!

A few of our other monkeys wanted to share what they were grateful for in 2014:

Justin Advich -“For me, it was learning new skills, having great mentors, and coming together more as a team. Also, attending Badcamp was a great opportunity”

Treena Bjarnason – “Developing a comfort level with all of the techy tools needed on a daily basis … Basecamp / Harvest / Google Drive etc. Also developing a comfort level with all of the staff and learning all their quirks. So very interesting :)”

Chris Arlidge – “Besides the fact I have remained employed for 2014, I not only learned new things about front end technologies (Foundation, Sass, etc) as well as the introduction of Sketch into my workflow”

Denis Babineau – “Work-related was accepting CSS frameworks in my life such as Bootstrap and Foundation. On a personal level the birth of my daughter Ellie”

Yan Yong “I feel grateful that Cheeky Monkey Media was selected, and worked diligently with the Drupal Association in 2014, including building and maintaining the Job Board and getting to do the designs for DrupalCon LA 2015”

Patty Beckerton – “My favorite 2014 moment was the t-shirt lineup at DrupalCon.”