That was 2010, here comes 2011

Like so many others I thought I’d put a post together looking back at what happened in 2010 and what’s ahead for 2011.

2010 the year that was

So what did happen in 2010? Well looking at my blog posts I started the year going on about Asp.Net Dynamic data as I was using it extensively at the time and wanted to brain dump about it.

Then at the end of March I changed jobs and moved to a medium/large enterprise (dependent on your definition of size) and my focus then changed to Scrum with several posts (starting here) by myself on the state of Scrum in my new job and how I worked with the ScrumMaster to fix them.  I also got my Certified Scrum Master and have applied for Certified Scrum Professional (CSP).

After I made a ‘harsh’ comment about a presentation at DDD8 I was challenged to do better myself and that started me down the path to give presentations, starting with grok talks at .Net Developers Network on Selnium (slides available here) and Asp.Net Dynamic data. I then went on to give presentations at DDD South West and DDD Ireland 10 about Scrum.

The commute to my new job is on the train and I used the time to catch up on some reading and finally managed to read some ‘essential’ books such as Code Complete, Clean Code, Extreme Programming Explained, etc and I started to review books for Manning books my favourite so far by Jon Skeet’s C# in depth 2nd Edition.

The one thing I didn’t do a lot of in 2010 was green field development in work, it was code verification, refactoring and for the majority of my time getting the team to work well together and really understand Scrum, however, I did do some of my OSS project which I haven’t released into the wild yet.

2011 the year ahead

So what do I want to do this year?

Well I want to build on what I did last year with more user group presentations (anybody interested give me a yell) and have made a good start by having my session Is your code S.O.L.I.D? accepted for DDD9 on 29th January.

My reading will continue, currently reading Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#, looking to read more essentials such as Refactoring: Improving the design of existing code and hoping to continue doing some more book reviews for Manning as I’ve really enjoyed that so far.

I’m hoping that my CSP application will be approved as that will be the last scrum certification I will look at doing unless I decide to go for Certified Scrum Coach, but that’s unlikely at the moment.

The one thing I’m hoping will change is the amount of development I get to do;  I'm looking to get my OSS project into the public domain and also an example of the Repository pattern that I’ve been working on (expect blog posts soon).  In the work place I’m looking at implementing continuous integration first for automated builds and then testing, not sure if I’ll get to automated deployment yet.  If I do manage to find the time, and I really hope I do, I want to look at F# and Ruby but it will probably depend on other commitments as to whether I get the time to do this.

The one thing that I would love, but wonder if its possible, is to earn a MVP but it may not be possible this year (or the next) I need to get more involved in community events, etc.

Right then, best get to it.