I won't recap 2008; I dislike public introspection and what's more, you can read all about my 2008 by visiting my blog's home page, which has everything. I think the home page weighs in at 5MB of content right now. It's huge, and unashamed of its hugeness—my blog wears a T-shirt that says "large and in charge." The T-shirt has prominent pizza stains. Deal with it.
It's already late January, and I've missed the new year's deadline, but I'm still roughly in time for the Chinese new year.
One thing dramatically missing from my 2008 was a proper book education. I read every programming-related aggregator known to mankind, listened to every programming podcast known to mankind, and read my share of technical weblogs. But I can't say I read programming books. Books!
I shouldn't have to explain why books are uniquely and deeply beneficial to any education. …So I won't.
6 is the reach goal, because for me, reading dense textbooks is tough. I used to put myself to sleep reading history textbooks. It turns out, Object Thinking by David West works just as well as a history textbook—even though (in both cases!) I'm interested in the subject at hand, focusing is tough.
Of the six, I'm going to start with JP's short list focused on coding fundamentals—not necessarily design, estimation, DDD, business analysis, project management, management, or whatever other useful fundamental skill you can imagine. Coding, not that other thing.
No specifics here because I don't know which three; I'll know when I need them. I'm just writing this as an acknowledgement that yes, at some point in the next year I'll have to tackle some new frameworks; this space is reserved for three such Unnamed Frameworks.
Okay, so, books. That's obvious.
Another obvious (and easy!) candidate is reading others' source code. Scott Hanselman has covered the why's of this topic well; I'm just here to say "me too." What's unfortunate is that I'm already running out of good samples. Most of the ASP.NET MVC samples don't even cover all the CRUD operations! CRUD!
At this one I'm doing well. So, stay the course!
Next: practice. This is easy to describe. If I want to become a strong developer, I need to practice. Others have done a good job explaining why; I'll just say that I plan to do this. And not just attending coding dojos, which are great, but actually doing some self-directed practice. "Practice" isn't a specific goal, so instead, we'll work at one minor development project.
Minor means that it doesn't have to change the world or make me a billion jiggawatt dollars. I'm also going to try to stop reading all the rags-to-riches-iPhone-app stories that appear regularly, seducing me with their plausibility. There's been a lot of those recently (story#1 story#2 story#3 story#4 story#5 story#6).
Anyway, the point is—make a project, finish it, and do so in such a way that I'm not ashamed to release the source code. No ulterior motives, like releasing it later as an iPhone app. But if I were to release an iPhone app—I have a dream where Steve Jobs shows up on my doorstep holding a duffel bag full of cash. He's there making his daily delivery of my iPhone app's earnings. In my dream Steve Wozniak is there too, giving me a thumbs up and another duffel bag full of cash. Woz doesn't work for Apple anymore; he's there because my iPhone app is that good.
Anyway, no iPhone apps.
As a way to practice, make one project; practice techniques while making the app; no ulterior motives. Sounds easy enough. I should clarify that I can't count work projects, no matter how proud of them I may or may not be.
While boycott is a strong word, it may not be strong enough to express how overwhelmed I am by the tide of technologies and frameworks coming from Microsoft! Also, it's a proven strategy—by boycotting Workflow 3.0 and LINQ to SQL in 2008, I saved a bunch of time not learning these deprecated frameworks. I'm sticking with this general strategy for 2009: if I don't need a technology, I won't pressure myself to learn it.
These are my technical learning goals for the year. Let me state that by no means is this my life priority for 2009. I think it would be awesome to reflect on 2009 and say "this was a great year," despite woefully failing to meet any of my stated goals above.
The point being, there are more important things than arguing about whether Silverlight matters. You know, life!
Oh and, quick, shot-across-the-bow answer: no, Silverlight still doesn't matter; don't learn it yet.
Something I noticed at the KAIZENC0NF was that there were exclusively enterprise development-related sessions (and I'm culpable as I could have suggested a topic Friday had I been there Friday). This didn't bother me at the time, but as I look back on the conference, it bothers me now. I think it's because I don't want to be truly great at enterprise development. Sure, I'm driven by a desire to be good at what I do. Sure, I want to remain gainfully employed, ideally such that I'm more valuable, rather than less, as time passes. This is all reasonable, and yes, I will put in the requisite effort. I.e., this means I'll spend time learning things I have no interest in learning, i.e. I'll work at it. The key word there being work.
But I'm not passionate about (name your enterprise vertical). I don't get excited learning a technology, framework or skill if I can only use it at work.
And don't think I just mean SharePoint (unpopular amongst .NET developers, an easy target); this applies also to the enterprise development aspects of DDD and Lean (popular, and on an upward arc*), and in learning enterprisey things like data warehouses. Or BPEL, or the abstract concepts behind BPEL. Yawn.*the key here is to note that yes, I believe they're valuable, but no, I can't seem to get excited about learning them. Don't overreact, I just mean "I can't get excited about learning them."
What's the point of trying to become truly great at enterprise development? Just enterprise development?
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