2011 into 2012

Just as I did in last years post this post is effectively a retrospective on 2011, including looking at whether I achieved what I wanted to achieve, and some goals for this year.

2011…

Goals

In my post from last year my goals were:

• More user group presentations
• More book reviews
• CSP application approval
• Increase amount of code I write  including look at Ruby & F#
• Continuous Integration
• Earn MVP

So how did I do?

More user group presentations
After being selected for DDD9 I then went on to present at almost every DDD event during the year only missing out on DDD Belfast and DDD Dundee. I also got to present at a couple of user groups it may have been more but being honest I don’t think I put enough effort into letting people who run the groups know that I was available.

One event that I did participate in, and hadn’t anticipated being part of, was the Progressive.Net Tutorials at Skills Matter where I presented So you think you know agile which I enjoyed immensely.

Book reviews
I only managed to do a single book review last year on the excellent Dependency Injection in .Net but for reasons that will become apparent I never managed to find the time to do any more reviews.

Unfortunately I didn’t manage to do a lot of reading this year only perhaps having read 3 books the whole year.

CSP Application approval
My application was approved, I am now both a Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Professional the latter to me being more important as it demonstrates an actual working knowledge and experience of Scrum rather than having just taken a course.

Increase amount of code I write
I can confidently say I succeeded in this, partly because I changed job again this year, which for me is very unusual to stay in a job for such a short period of time, and my focus changed from team leadership/management to near enough pure development.  This change in job did mean that I no longer commuted by train I had so I lost that time.

I also worked on my own code that I pushed to GitHub and much to my surprise and delight a couple of my repo’s have been forked by other people so it would seem I may be dong something right.

One thing I didn’t spend any time on this year was the OSS project I mentioned in the 2010 post and this will be because of the other code I worked on during the year.

I never managed to look at either Ruby or F# my time being taken up with the code I wrote and pushed to GitHub and also because I simply forgot that I had set myself that goal.

Continuous Integration
When I moved jobs I got the opportunity to start using CI and moved from simply automating builds to build and test then build, test & deploy and finally added in the in built code coverage support to show the test coverage of the project being built. 

My experience has solely been with Team City because I found it very easy to work with, especially with help from Paul Stack when I ran into a few issues who helped me sort them out and get everything moving smoothly.

Earn MVP
Well I failed at this utterly. I have no idea how you get onto the MVP program and didn’t even attempt to find out.

What else went on?

This Blog
When I look back at the blog I noticed that I posted far more posts in 2010 than I did in 2011 30 vs 52 but interestingly from the limited metrics that blogger provides the traffic has increased (I have Google analytics in place now but still won’t give me a full years stats). 

The blog also changed from being purely a brain dump to expressing an opinion on a subject, such as Software Developer != Zen Warrior, and telling people about the code I started to push onto GitHub.

Give Camp UK
This was a massive event, where developers gave up a weekend to create software for charity. A note here is nowhere near enough to cover it but hopefully my post has sufficient detail.

… into 2012

I’m again looking to the future here to set myself some goals to try and achieve during the year and this time I’m keeping a note of them on my own kanban board so I can track how I’m getting on.

• Blog posts – I’m looking to continue writing blog posts with a series of posts on NDepend coming up soon.
• Read books – I have a list of books that I want to read and am going to try and make time to do so
• Presentations – I have a couple of presentations I want to write and am looking for inspiration for other subjects
• MVP – even if I’m not able to earn one I’ll at least look into how you go about becoming eligible for one.
• Coding – I’m splitting my goals into will do and nice to do:
• Will Do
• Concerted effort to finish the OSS project I started about 2 years ago
• Improve my JavaScript – looking at the future of development I know I need to improve my JavaScript skills
• Continue working on my ADO.NET DAL, I have some ideas about it including changing the API
• Nice to do
• Nuget – I would love to put a Nuget package together and get it published
• Learn PowerShell – it seems PowerShell could be massively useful so if I’m able to incorporate learning it in my normal coding activities then I’ll do so.
• Learn Python – over the last year I have seen more and more articles, tweets, etc about python so fancy having a go at coding with it.
• Develop WP7 apps – having purchased a WP7 I would love to be able to develop applications for it.

Now looking at the list I’m already thinking I’m going to be very busy and will need to get some brownie points in with the other half to try and get some time to do all this.

So if you’ve read this far you know what I’m going to be doing in 2012 but what will you be up to?