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.) 

 

2010 Wrap Up

So at the end of 2009 I posted a list of goals I wanted to accomplish in 2010. This post serves as a recap of what I accomplished and didn't accomplish. Tomorrow I'll post my goals for 2011. Yes it's a bit cliché but it's good to have a picture of what you want to do. 

2010 Recap

1) (Partial Credit) Update this blog with a new topic at least twice a month. I managed this for about 3 months, then it vanished. As usual when the schedule got hectic this fell by the wayside. So this goal gets renewed for 2011. I just moved the site over to squarespace (and i'm loving it) and really want to keep it useful.

2) (Success) Speak at something, anything, and codemash doesn't count. I pulled this one off. I spoke at CleRB once this year about geolocation in rails and also pitched at Startup weekend. Not huge events by any means but its the start of public speaking. I need to try and get out there more this year, but its surprisingly hard coming up with interesting topics. 

3) (Success) Continue developing a Kanban approach for consultancies and apply it to my current job. Well so kinda. I didn't pull this one off at the "current job" but i did switch jobs and have moved to a company where helping establish Kanban was one of my first priorities. I'm very happy to report we now have a working process with a mostly remote team and all seems to be going well. My goal is to expand on this in 2011 and bring in more Agile techniques to our consulting practice. 

4) (Success) Learn some of the new development techniques and technologies in the .NET world. So of my original list I can say that I now have experience in NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, WPF and an academic knowledge of MVC. I'm confident in the next few months MVC will move into the "very comfortable" stage. In addition to that I've learned quite about about MVP pattern and EF4.

5) (Success) Continue to get to know Ruby. I'm really proud of the experience I've gained in ruby this year. It's truly gone from a hobby to something I am comfortable using professionally and recommending to clients. The specific bullet points from last years list aren't necessarily all filled in yet but overall I'm happy standing in as a defacto ruby expert on projects. Goal for 2011 is simply keep going, i love the platform more and more as i use it and there are some great rubiests in cleveland to learn from.

6) (Complete, not really success) Get things squared away with Greenfield Studios. Well Greenfield Studios is no longer in use but for quite a few months i used the name Greenfield Consulting (and technically still do) for side project work. The new gig has brought a bit more intensity so I've stopped doing side work for now but things are straight on this one. 

7) (Epic Fail) Finish EventCasts and one other side project. Eventcasts was shuttered and the codebase made open source on github. Started a new project, Questering, but that too has languished. Now I'm working with a fantastic team on the project we started for Startup Weekend - Dreamkumo. This one seems to have legs, we'll see how 2011 goes.

House /Personal Goals

These didnt go so well

1) (Fail) Finish remodeling the basement Nothing has really happened in a year. The tiles up but that's about it. Too much time & month for right now. 

2) (Fail) Seal the floor in the garage - I forgot about this one

3) (Depressing Fail) Take a vacation somewhere outside of Ohio or any state that borders Ohio. This is my most depressing failure. In 2011 we are going to Boston for a friends wedding so that could serve as a kickoff for a decent vacation though, we'll see.

4) (Consistent Fail) Pay off my friends at Discover Card. Ya.... i'm going to be paying these people forever. The notion of debt reduction doesn't seem to be in my vocabulary.

5) (Shocking Fail) Figure out a "diet plan" and stick to it, lose 10 lbs a month. Ya that was sarcasm (the shocking part) this didn't happen. I did start working out with a trainer and am doing pretty well, i think, but haven't really lost much weight. 

So that's 2010. Tomorrow I'll post what I want to do in 2011 including a new blog series I want to write and some other goals. 

My 2010 Challenge List

Last year my friend John posted about challenging himself for the new year. Obviously not a new concept but there was something I enjoyed about his posting the ideas publicly and then following up on them, if for no other reason than I realized I too wanted to accomplish some of the same things. So in that same vein I figured what better way to dust off this blog than to commit to digital pen and paper my list of resolutions. In fact the dustiness of the blog will directly influence my first one:

Professional Goals:

1) Update this blog with a new topic at least twice a month. This seems an obtainable goal, I do have new ideas to talk about I just never follow up or write them down. Time to change that.

2) Speak at something, anything, and codemash doesn't count. I consider myself a terrible public speaker. Always have been. I get all nervous and shaky and well.. its awkward, but every time I step up and do it I get a little bit better. So I need to do it more often. This could be at something like Ignite Cleveland or a user group or conference. Whichever.

3) Continue developing a Kanban approach for consultancies and apply it to my current job. Towards the end of this past year I started getting my coworkers interested in improving how we do project work. We started using a Kanban-lite style approach for in house work and overall people seem to like it. I want to build on this and actually teach people how the system works. Fortunately I have some fellow advocates in this one.

4) Learn some of the new development techniques and technologies in the .NET world. My day job is 90% .NET work but in reality I find myself more passionate about open source technologies and little scrappy "upstart" languages like Ruby. That said there is some really cool stuff happening in .NET and in order to continue to make my career there I need to learn them. So a short list:

• NHibernate w/ Castle or ActiveRecord


• WPF


• WCF


• Microsoft MVC

5) Continue to get to know Ruby. I really like this platform and the communities focus on TDD (or BDD) and generally maintainable code is commendable. This year I mainly want to accomplish a couple things.

• Use cucumber on a project


• Get comfortable with Rails and RSpec where I don't need a book to look up simple things anymore.


• Compete and complete an application for Rails Rumble 2010


• Relaunch EventCasts (the new name for our previous Rails Rumble app Twoups.

6) Get things squared away with Greenfield Studios. Greenfield Studios is the company that some friends and I started last year to try and build a site that would help people affordable use and locate green technologies. The site never amounted to much due to a lack of real data on the topic so it has effectively been shuttered. Since then I've wanted to reuse the name and restructure it legally to serve as an identity to put on any independent contracting work or product work I do. This means finding a good lawyer who I can afford. Suggestions are welcome :-)

7) Finish EventCasts and one other side project. Lately I've been using google wave to track the various side project ideas I have. At present there are 4 in the hopper. I want to get EventCasts done and one of the other 4 by the end of 2010.

House Goals

1) Finish remodeling the basement (without hiring someone to do it). A year ago when we moved in I decided I wanted to build an entertainment / theatre room in my basement. Not sure I'll be able to afford the expensive projector for it this year but I can finish the remodeling part. Also i want to learn how to do this stuff, so hiring someone for anything but the electrical and maybe carpet is off limits.

2) Seal the floor in the garage - I like the look of a painted sealed floor.

Personal Goals

1) Take a vacation somewhere outside of Ohio or any state that borders Ohio. I haven't gone away on vacation (excepting our honeymoon) in a long time.  My wife and I really want to go to NYC or Vegas, which neither of us have ever been to.

2) Pay off my friends at Discover Card. I bought a lot of dumb crap in college and continue to do so.

3) Figure out a "diet plan" and stick to it, lose 10 lbs a month. This is quite possibly insane, and I probably wont pull off 120 lbs in a year but what the hell why not shoot for the moon. I hate the phrase diet because even I know there's no such thing as a fad diet that works. Its about discipline and consistency in eating, exercising and life style. However despite knowing this academically I have yet to actually accomplish it.

I suppose that's all for now. I liked John's reading list from his post but I'll save that for another update (2 per month now right?)

Do you have any plans for 2010 or do any of these "resolutions" ring true for you as well? That's what comments are for :-)