2011 Goals

Well a week in and I'm off to a great start. Said I'd post a follow up on Wed the 5th, it's now Wed the 12th. Awesome. 

So as mentioned in my last post, in the beginning of 2010 I posted a list of goals for the coming year. That list became a guide for the year, some worked out, others didnt. Either way I found value in the post so to start 2011 it's time to do it again. 

So first off:

Renewed Goals

1) Update this blog twice a month. 
2) Seal the floor in the garage
3) Pay off the credit card(s)
4) Take a vacation outside of a border state 

All of these are pretty much the same as last year. 

Ammended Goals

1) Continue speaking, but more importantly prepare a talk that can be presented multiple times for multiple audiences.

This will probably be an intro to ruby or rails talk which I can give for work and possibly the CleRB group if we want to do another newbie night sometime soon. But If i can polish it and there's still interest in that basic of a talk I'd be happy to present elsewhere.

2) Learn some new stuff in .NET

This years list: Fluent NH or ActiveRecord NH, Dynamics and the DLR, MVC3, Cuke4Nuke or Specflow

3) Diet plan. I'm working with a personal trainer it's time to get better at nutrition. I'm terrible at it (food is kinda amazing.)

New Goals (Professional)

1) Build a series of blog posts or a mini-book on using the techniques i've learned in Ruby development and applying them to .NET

2) Be a good team lead. I have 2 guys working with me now and it's pretty new. So far it seems to be going well but theres a fine line to walk between being adamant about quality and being a jerk. Hoping I can manage the tight rope. 

3) Get serious about javascript testing. It's a first class and hugely important language and it's irresponsible of me to spend a ton of time testing c# or ruby or php and not pay attention to javascript. 

4) Get serious about ATDD. For .NET projects it will be cuke4nuke or specflow (or possibly cucumber but probably not), for ruby its cucumber. 

5) Finish and launch Dreamkumo. More about this one at a later date. 

New Goals (Personal)

1) Get a budget in order and start tracking expenses. I've tried this a couple times using mint but so far I've given up after a short period of time. Need to get the wife on board with this one cause its a bit bad to not really know where your money is going. 

2) Finish the upstairs flooring. Seriously they are plywood floors right now, kinda embarrassing if this doesn't get done in 2011 there's seriously something wrong. 

I think that's all for now. Time to get back to codemash (another upcoming post.)