Filed Under (Uncategorized) by John Miller on 03-01-2010
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.
Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:
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!
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by John Miller on 28-07-2009
I just began reading Brownfield Application Development in .Net and came across a statement that I found very interesting.
"We Don’t Need Another Hero"
The book does an awesome job describing something called the "Hero Programmer Syndrome". This is defined as someone who will do whatever it takes to meet ridiculous deadlines. They may come in early, stay late, trade family time for work time, etc. They are usually the only person on the team with working knowledge of how the many parts of an system work together. They make sure stuff gets done. And when they produce super-human results, they (not the team) are rewarded by management.
A team will actually run more efficiently if the responsibilities (and resulting glories) are spread out across the entire team. This creates a feeling of collective-ownership which empowers all team members to take pride in the application being developed as well as get them to learn about the entire application stack instead of just focusing on their own little piece of the pie. It also makes adapting to change much easier if management can depend on any member of the team to get a task done instead of just the "hero developer".
I’m only in the first chapter, but so far this book has been a great read!
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by John Miller on 02-07-2009
Earlier in the year I made a list of goals I wanted to accomplish this year and decided to publish my progress periodically here…to produce some sort of accountability. And as usual, seeing Darrell’s update made me realize that it’s been way to long since my last update!
Technical Goals
Read the following books:
Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:
- ASP.Net MVC – No progress, hopefully in the next few months…
- NHibernate – Finished! Used NHibernate in my first project a couple of months ago and was blown away by it’s awesomeness!
- The Castle Stack – Finished! Used Windsor on a recent project and explored ActiveRecord. Believe this is as far as I want to go with Castle this year.
- Team City – Finished! Set up Team City for several projects in the last few months.
- Ruby (the basics at a minimum) – Finished (but still learning)! My goal was to just learn the basics, actually taking that a step further and am working on an actual Rails project with a Josh.
- Powershell – No progress here.
Get involved:
- Two blog posts per month – I more or less went silent in the last two months and hope to kick myself back into gear over the weekend. Started a series of posts comparing design pattern implementations in Ruby and C#, but only finished the first one (Template pattern). Will be continuing this series very soon. I promise.
- 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 – We took a trip to Disney World last month (which was a blast!) and are hoping to take another long vacation in the next few months.
- Take 6 weekend getaways – Way behind on this one, believe we’ve taken one so far this year.
- 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 – I just finished II Kings so my guess is that put’s me at around 30% complete…and 50% of the year is gone already.
Financial
- Reduce debt by two-thirds – Surprisingly still on track here, it’s forced us to live paycheck to paycheck but it feels good to see substantial progress being made!
- Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works – No longer as interested in stocks at the moment, mostly because almost all of our spare money is going to debt reduction. May pick interest up again next year.
Side Projects
- Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year! – Almost done, hope to launch this month!!
- Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year. – Still working on a project with Josh, may not turn a profit this year but we’ll see.
Looks like I’m really falling behind in my reading (although I’ve been reading things here and there, they just haven’t been books on my list). Planning to change that in the second half of the year.
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by John Miller on 02-03-2009
I just saw that Darrell posted his goals progress for the year which reminded me that I promised to do the same. (Thanks for the reminder, Darrell).
But before I go over my status, I want to share a quote I heard on twitter today.
continuous improvement is a personal thing, if you are “continuously” comparing yourself to others, you will “continually” be disappointed…just be better than “yourself” yesterday
That quote came from JP Boodhoo, and sums up perfectly something I personally struggled with in the past. If your drive to learn exists only because you’re trying to keep up with the Jones’, then learning will become a chore instead of something that you get enjoyment from. Life’s too short, make it fun!
Technical Goals
Read the following books:
Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:
- ASP.Net MVC – No progress made here. Guessing that this one will have to wait til the second half of the year.
- NHibernate – In progress. Just started a project with NHibernate, although I’m admittedly not use Fluent NHibernate on Linq to NHibernate and I probably should be. Kinda wanted to do my first NHibernate project the “hard way” so I’d have a good understanding of what makes those other tools work.
- The Castle Stack – Toyed around with ActiveRecord and could see it being used on a smaller project, but given the choice between it and NHibernate, I would rather work with NHibernate. I’m using basic features of Windsor in my current work project, but future projects will probably be using Ninject (gotta support our fellow Ohio developers!). With ASP.Net MVC and FubuMVC out (or almost out), I don’t believe that I’ll be using Monorail in the future, so I’m marking this goal as complete since I probably won’t need to work with these frameworks any more this year.
- Team City – Using Team City currently and am very impressed with how easy it was to set up. And the interface is simply awesome, would expect nothing else from the makers of Resharper!
- Ruby (the basics at a minimum) – In progress. Just starting to get into Ruby and have been very impressed with it thus far. Especially the testing capabilities. RSpec feels much more natural when writing BDD style tests than with the frameworks we have available in .Net. Planning to really sink my teeth into the language over the next couple of weeks.
- Powershell – No progress here yet.
Get involved:
- Two blog posts per month – Two per month so far. No less, no more. Surprised at how hard it is to keep up with this. I have a whole new respect for those developers that manage to write 2+ per week!
- Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company. – After this project, I’m planning on doing a TDD talk with my coworkers. So the first should be coming in the next couple of months.
Certifications:
- Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5 – No progress here.
Personal Goals
Family Time
- Take 2 one week long trips – First trip is scheduled, wife and I are going with her parents to Disney in May.
- Take 6 weekend getaways – Took a weekend trip to West Virginia in January. Didn’t do much of anything exciting, just relaxed. Which was exactly what we both needed!
- By the end of the year, work from home regularly two times per week – Only a couple of months in and I’m not seeing me hitting this goal at my current workplace. I work for a consulting company and a lot of our engagements are on site. Maybe some opportunities will open up towards the end of the year.
Belief System
- Read the Bible completely through – A little behind here but not too bad. Just started Numbers so hitting the end-of-year goal is still certainly doable.
Financial
- Reduce debt by two-thirds – On track here thus far.
- Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works – Learned that it takes nerves off steel to do day trading. Not to mention a lot of time to research trends. I think short term trading is a bit more my style instead of day trading.
Side Projects
- Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year! – Sadly no progress here.
- Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year. – A buddy and I are starting a new side project (in Ruby on Rails, attempting to kill two birds with one stone) and although we both realize that we probably won’t make any money on it this year, we’re excited to be working towards something. Succeed or fail, we want to give it a shot!
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by John Miller on 28-12-2008
January 1st. Usually around this time of year I create a list of pie-in-the-sky resolutions for the new year, although they are almost always forgotten by Valentines Day. Like most people, I start out uber motivated with full intentions of keeping that pace throughout the year. But that eagerness fizzles out as the weeks go by. I think this happens for a couple of reasons. For starters, my goals are usually over zealous and unrealistic. Setting the bar high is important (very important) but goals need to be reasonable and attainable. For really large, long term goals, it helps to break them down into smaller easier to swallow milestones. The feeling on accomplishment after hitting a milestone will help keep the interest alive as you move towards the final, larger goal.
The second cause of demise in new year’s resolutions stems from a lack of accountability. It’s way too easy to put them off if you are the only one who knows what your goals are. So this year I decided to post my list of goals on this blog and will be submitting updates every two months to show my progress.
I would like to challenge anyone reading this to do the same in the new year. Set high, but attainable goals for yourself over the next 12 months. And don’t keep them to yourself! Advertise them. Whether that means listing them on a blog, hanging them up at work, or just sharing them with your significant other. Measure the progress at regular intervals and make adjustments if you’re not happy with where you’re at.
Technical Goals
Read the following books:
Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:
Get involved:
- Two blog posts per month
- Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company.
Certifications:
- Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5
Personal Goals
Family Time
- Take 2 one week long trips
- Take 6 weekend getaways
- By the end of the year, work from home regularly two times per week
Belief System
- Read the Bible completely through
Financial
- Reduce debt by two-thirds
- Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works
Side Projects
- Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year!
- Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year.
Would love to hear about goals that you’re pushing yourself towards this year!!
