John Miller|“Risks weren’t that scary once you took them.”

Like many others are doing, it’s time to reflect on 2009 and set the bar for the new year!

Last Year

Last year started strong, but work took over a lot of my free time during the second half of the year. I knew some of the goals were gonna be more than I could handle but wanted to keep the bar high!
Technical Goals
Read the following books:
Read 1 out of 6….pitiful. To be fair, I did do a good amount of technical reading this year, just not these specific books.

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture – Fowler – Finished!
• Domain Driven Design – Evans
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns – Nilsson
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code – Feathers
• Refactoring – Fowler
• Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# - Martin

Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:

• ASP.Net MVC – No progress, this will certainly be on the 2010 goal list.
• NHibernate – Finished!
• The Castle Stack – Finished (not familiar with the entire stack, only the parts I was interested in)!
• Team City – Finished!
• Ruby (the basics at a minimum) – Finished!
• Powershell – No progress here.

Get involved:

• Two blog posts per month – Was surprised at how hard it was to keep up with this. Did awesome the first 2/3 of the year but pretty much stopped blogging in September. Hoping to change that this year.
• Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company. – Our company has gone through some changes and I don’t see after hours presentations like this happening in the near future, so I’m gonna scratch this one for now.

Certifications:

• Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5 – No progress here.

Personal Goals
Family Time

• Take 2 one week long trips – Considering this one met.
• Take 6 weekend getaways – Took a couple weekend trips, but didn’t do all 6.
• By the end of the year, work from home regularly two times per week – This is a tough one with my current job, the ability to do this is completely dependant on the project\client and hasn’t been an option lately.

Belief System

• Read the Bible completely through – Finished with a day to spare!

Financial

• Reduce debt by two-thirds – Made it within a few hundred dollars of our goal!
• Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works – Started learning and lost interest, don’t think day trading is for me :).

Side Projects

• Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year! – Finished!
• Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year. – Josh and I are in the middle of a project that we hoped to have finished by CodeMash (although we have a lot of work to do this week if we’re going to hit that goal. Will more than likely launch end of Feb or early March.

2010 Challenges

Technical Goals

• Read 6 technical books - Taking a different approach this year. Instead selecting 6 books at the start of the year, I’m going to pick as I go.
• Learn ASP.Net MVC - No excuses this year!
• Become more fluent with Ruby\Rails\RSpec\etc. - Last year I started picking up Ruby but never really hit the point where I was more than just hacking away at things. This year I want to learn to do things the *right* way.
• Learn Ninject - This one has been on my radar for a long time, just haven’t taken the time to pick up and go with it.
• One blog article per month - I know, you’re not supposed to lower the bar year-to-year, but I want to keep more of my free time open for other things this year.
• Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5 – …and then 4.0
• Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company.

Personal Goals

• Launch two side projects - Stole this goal from Josh. We’re hoping to launch both EventCasts and a new project by the end of the year.
• Read 6 non-technical books
• Become debt-free (not counting mortgage & car loans)

While this isn’t everything I want to accomplish this year, I decided to keep it much shorter than last year. We’ve got a lot of (good) things happening at the moment and don’t want to burn myself out by adding too many things to the list!