Logan's Rings: GOOOOALS, 2010 Review

I started blogging a little over a year ago and one of my first posts was a list of goals for 2010. Now that it's the end of the year, let's see how I did.

2010 goal 1: Read a book a month.

I was close with 10. Here's what I read:

Understanding the Professional Programmer and Becoming a Technical Leader - Gerald Weinberg

Cube Farm - Bill Blunden

Software Craftsmanship - Pete McBreen

Secrets of the Rock Star Programmers - Ed Burns

The Passionate Programmer - Chad Fowler

Apprenticeship Patterns, Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman - Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Tom DeMarco

Waltzing with Bears - Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Professional Software Development - Steve McConnell

I did start another book: Write Great Code, Volume 1: Understanding the Machine by Randall Hyde. This one is challenging to get through due to it's complexity and technical nature. I will complete it this year and get to the second volume!

2010 goal 2. Finish the exploratory/learning "Rental Management System" (RMS) I've started writing in Java.

Not quite on this one. My initial problem domain proved to be a little too complex in that I was spending more time on understanding the requirements rather than focusing on the code, so I switched to a simpler domain: a book library. I was able to complete this system and I'm happy with the result. The UI is not too fancy but functional. More importantly, I really learned a lot by rolling my own persistence and error handling/logging.

2010 goal 3. Learn a new programming language by rewriting the RMS in that new language.

I really had fun with this one. I rewrote the Java/JSF book library in Groovy/Grails. The Grails framework is fascinating and I love its abstractions.

2010 goal 4. Write two blog posts a month.

Yes! I got to 34:

5 posts in January
3 posts in February
3 posts in March
5 posts in April
2 posts in May
4 posts in June
1 post in July
1 post in August
2 posts in September
1 post in October
5 posts in November
2 posts in December

5. Take some sort of multi-day software development training.

Yes! I was able to attend the following: