Better late than never, right? I should’ve done this in December, but at least it’s only two weeks into the New Year.
Last year was a great year. Looking back at my 2010 resolutions, here’s what I accomplished:
- Learn a new language – really dove head first into learning Objective-C, along with the Cocoa and UIKit frameworks
- Built and released my first iOS app, FloodWatch
My 2010 resolutions aside, I also managed to make a move to Yahoo!, start to hone my front end developer skills, do some Java work, learn some Hadoop and Pig scripting, learn some Lua, and speak at BarCamp Charleston. It’s been a busy year!
I’ve been absolutely horrible at blogging over the past year, though. Two posts in 2010 is just pitiful and sad. Shame on me.
So, given the look back and the year ahead, here’s what I’m challenging myself with:
- Blog more: This is the biggest resolution of them all. I really need to write a few blog posts a month on whatever it is that I’m working on, when I might have something that can and should be shared with a larger potential audience. More often than not, I complete my tasks at hand and charge ahead to the next ones. I need to take more time to stop, reflect, and share.
- Speak at more user groups and conferences: …this is already in the works, too, with my first 2011 talk at Atlanta PHP on February 3, 2011. I’ll be talking on the Yahoo! Query Language.
- Write another article: …already in the works! Look for it later in the year.
- Continue to sharpen my development and architecture skills: I’ve learned an amazing amount of new things during my time at Yahoo! I work with some ridiculously smart people, and am constantly learning from them and becoming a better developer because the people in my environment. I’m loving every single day in the office where I get to focus on code and architecture. This one should be a breeze.
- Read some of the classic programming books again: Classic books like The Pragmatic Programmer and Code Complete are great to read every few years to keep yourself grounded and humble. This should be one of those years for me.
- Build another app of some sort, iOS, Mac or otherwise: …have some ideas here, should be totally doable.
- Spend some more time with PHP: I haven’t written much PHP since mid-2010, so it’d be nice to get back to it. I should contribute to Zend Framework, etc. – that’d be a great way to achieve this goal, while contributing to the community at the same time.
- Get back on the conference circuit: I didn’t do so well with this in 2010, mostly due to my job change. I’d like to get to at least one PHP, OSS, or development conference in 2011.
So, that’s what I’ll be doing in 2011. Hopefully I’ll be here about 50 weeks from now, recounting how I knocked out every single one of these.
What are you doing in 2011?