Tag: review

It’s annual review time again, which means this year has gone by even more quickly than usual. Filling out my self-assessment was a good reminder of all the work I had a hand in completing.  I’m still deciding on goals for 2012, and I’m posting all of them here so I can look back on them over the course of next year and track my progress.

1. Learn jQuery.  I got a bit of exposure to it this year through a couple of projects that I worked on, and a .NET user group presentation or two, but haven’t done the sort of deep dive that would help me improve the look-and-feel of the web applications I build and maintain.
2. Learn a functional programming language.  I’ve been thinking about this more recently since some of our work involves the implementation of valuation models in code.  I also came across this article in the November Communications of the ACM advocating OCaml.  Since I work in a Microsoft shop, picking up something like F# might have a slightly better chance of making it into production code than OCaml or Haskell.  Part of my objective in learning a functional programming language is to help me recognize and make better use of functional techniques in a language like C#, which has added more and more support for the functional programming style of the years.
3. Give a few technical talks/presentations.  This year, I presented on NuGet at my job, and on Reflector at RockNUG. Having to present on a tool or technology to group has always been a great incentive to do some deep learning of a subject.  It’s also a chance to exercise some speaking skills (which developers need a lot more than they might think in order to be successful) and to handle a Q & A session.  I haven’t developed any new presentations yet, but some prospective topics include: LINQPad, elmah,
4. Take more online training. We have access to Pluralsight .NET training through work.  I watched quite a few of their videos over the course of the year.  2012 shouldn’t be any different in that respect.  I recently came across free webcasts on a variety of topics from DevelopMentor.  Since they’re downloadable as well as streamable, I’ll definitely use my commute to watch some of them.
5. Write a compiler. It’s been awhile since I’ve cracked open “the dragon book”, so I’m probably overdue to exercise my brain in that way.  I found that suggestion (and a number of other very useful ones) here.
6. Practice.  I’d heard of the “code kata” idea before, but hadn’t really explored it.  Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmers has nearly a couple dozen here.