+++
title = "2014 - year in review"
date = 2014-12-27 16:36:59
+++

Simply put, 2014 was probably my best year ever. I'm incredibly grateful for the chances I've been given in this past year and stoked to continue.

This post highlights some of the things I've been doing in 2014..

#### Mailchimp for WordPress
At the start of 2014, my [Mailchimp for WordPress plugin](https://www.mc4wp.com/) had just over 100.000 free downloads and a few hundred paying customers.

![MC4WP was downloaded over 830.000 times](/media/2014/mc4wp-830K-downloads.jpg)

During 2014, the plugin has grown to 830.000+ free downloads, 5.000+ paying customers (**thank you!**) and [300+ positive plugin reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/Mailchimp-for-wp).

#### 1.5 million total plugin downloads
[My combined WordPress plugins download count](http://wptally.com/?wpusername=dvankooten) has grown from 600.000 downloads to just over 1.5 million. Woah!

I contributed a minor patch to the [Simple Custom CSS plugin](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-custom-css/) by [John Regan](https://johnregan3.wordpress.com/) after which he added me as co-author - that accounts for 200.000 new downloads and should be taken into account. :)

#### Visited WordCamp Europe & 7 more countries
I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Europe in Bulgaria, a meet-up for digital nomads in Spain & Morocco and 5 other beautiful countries: Germany, England, Italy, Serbia and Poland.

While I'm not pretty or famous enough to be photographed here's a photo where I nearly made it - I'm the blurry one sitting next to the Woo guys [Barry Kooij](https://barrykooij.com/) and [Mike Jolley](https://mikejolley.com/).

![Photo of me, Barry Kooij and Mike Jolley during WordCamp Europe 2014](/media/2014/wordcamp-europe-2014.jpg)

#### Graduated at Yoast
I got my bachelor's degree in Computer Science after a 6-month internship at [Yoast](https://yoast.com/). During these 6 months, I mainly worked on improving testability of their [WordPress SEO plugin](https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/).

#### Open-source contributions
My first open-source contribution was a small PHP routing library called [AltoRouter](https://altorouter.com/), which I developed several years ago. I finally got around to creating a simple site for it, which helped the project near 300 GitHub stars.

#### A ton of reading, learning & thinking
I've learned _a lot_ in 2014: new technologies, web development concepts, ways of doing business, crazy EU VAT rules, how to be a better person in general and how to stay sane while traveling or working from home for weeks in a row.

#### What's next?
2015 will be fun. I'll be..

- Releasing a new product (more on this later).
- Introducing some cool new features & feature improvements in Mailchimp for WordPress.
- Finally dropping PHP 5.2 support for all of my existing plugins. [Coen Jacobs has some great ideas on the whys and hows of this](https://coenjacobs.me/wordpress-plugins-require-php-5-4/).
- Continuing my exploration of the JavaScript world. I've been working with Node.js & client-side MVC a lot lately - and loving it.
- Hiring. ~~Looking for a remote position? I'm looking for someone to help me out handling support for my WordPress plugins.~~
