Thursday, December 31, 2009

GOOOOALS

Welcome to 2010! Let it be a year of professional action and growth.

You've got to set goals if you want to achieve, right? And put them in writing. It's serious stuff. But, I'm not going to get too complex . I'm shooting for doable, understandable, manageable & beneficial.

So, without further ado, here are my goals for 2010:

1. Read a book a month.
Something software development related, either management or technical. Here's my (ever growing) to-be-read list:
  • Becoming a Technical Leader - Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
  • Exploring Requirements - Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections, and Technical Reviews - Daniel P. Freedman, Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - Andy Hunt
  • The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Software Craftsmanship - Pete McBreen
  • Understanding the Professional Programmer - Gerald M. Weinberg
  • Waltzing With Bears - Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister


2. Finish the exploratory/learning "Rental Management System" (RMS) I've started writing in Java.

3. Learn a new programming language by rewriting the RMS in that new language.
Any suggestions?

4. Write two blog posts a month.
This is harder than it sounds (for me, at least).

5. Take some sort of multi-day software development training.
It can't be all book-learning and coding!

Wish me luck...

2 comments:

Aaron said...

Wouldn't be a far leap to write your RMS program in C#. It is very similar to Java. If you want to test your design you could try just rewriting compoents of it in different languages. You could do something crazy like write the UI in Python (a great scripting language BTW).

Mark Plesko said...

Yeah, thought about that. C# and/or Ruby.
Thanks.