Since yesterday’s post about my goals for next year, I heard from my friend Faisal about a jQuery plugin he’s been working on called Ninja UI. It’s on github, so I’ll definitely be checking it out as part of my learning of jQuery for next year. Going beyond using open source tools to being a committer on one would be a big step forward for me.
Month: December 2011
Another Year Gone
It’s annual review time again, which means this year has gone by even more quickly than usual. Filling out my self-assessment was a good reminder of all the work I had a hand in completing. I’m still deciding on goals for 2012, and I’m posting all of them here so I can look back on them over the course of next year and track my progress.
- Learn jQuery. I got a bit of exposure to it this year through a couple of projects that I worked on, and a .NET user group presentation or two, but haven’t done the sort of deep dive that would help me improve the look-and-feel of the web applications I build and maintain.
- Learn a functional programming language. I’ve been thinking about this more recently since some of our work involves the implementation of valuation models in code. I also came across this article in the November Communications of the ACM advocating OCaml. Since I work in a Microsoft shop, picking up something like F# might have a slightly better chance of making it into production code than OCaml or Haskell. Part of my objective in learning a functional programming language is to help me recognize and make better use of functional techniques in a language like C#, which has added more and more support for the functional programming style of the years.
- Give a few technical talks/presentations. This year, I presented on NuGet at my job, and on Reflector at RockNUG. Having to present on a tool or technology to group has always been a great incentive to do some deep learning of a subject. It’s also a chance to exercise some speaking skills (which developers need a lot more than they might think in order to be successful) and to handle a Q & A session. I haven’t developed any new presentations yet, but some prospective topics include: LINQPad, elmah,
- Take more online training. We have access to Pluralsight .NET training through work. I watched quite a few of their videos over the course of the year. 2012 shouldn’t be any different in that respect. I recently came across free webcasts on a variety of topics from DevelopMentor. Since they’re downloadable as well as streamable, I’ll definitely use my commute to watch some of them.
- Write a compiler. It’s been awhile since I’ve cracked open “the dragon book”, so I’m probably overdue to exercise my brain in that way. I found that suggestion (and a number of other very useful ones) here.
- Practice. I’d heard of the “code kata” idea before, but hadn’t really explored it. Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmers has nearly a couple dozen here.