Taller Code

John Miller has a nice post throwing his 2009 goals out there for everyone to see, and challenging everyone else to do the same. I think it’s a great idea, so here’s my list for 2009:

Books

In order:

1. Code Complete – Steve McConnell (yep, I’ve never actually read it)
2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture – Martin Fowler
3. Domain Driven Design – Erick Evans
4. Working Effectively With Legacy Code – Robert Martin

Tools/Techniques/Processes @ Work

• NHibernate and all its trimmings (FluentNHibernate, LINQ to NHibernate, etc), which I’ll need on a project here real soon.
• Actually move from CC.NET to Team City (last attempt didn’t go so well).
• Build a more robust build script and management process – including production deployment scenarios.
• Messaging framework, either MassTransit, NServiceBus, or Ayende’s new Rhino Service Bus if he’s able to release it in time for our current project.

Involvement

• We have weekly meetings to catch everyone up on what we’re doing, but I want to present on an actual topic during at least 2 of these – and present in a way where the other development teams will see the use in picking up the presented tool/technique.
• Have at least one meeting of the CantonALT.NET group and see if it can ever get up on its feet.
• The two blog posts per month target John put out there seems doable, so I’ll borrow it 🙂
• At least 3 feature/patch submissions to open source projects.

Productivity

• Trim RSS feed size by 1/3 (presently at 127, so trim it to at least 85) and cut time viewing it by half. I’ve gotten much better this past year at cutting through the useless stuff, but there’s still a lot there and it sucks up too much of my time.

My goal list might seem a little on the light side, but that’s simply because I have a lot of personal goals that I’d like to tackle this year (which I’ve detailed on my personal blog), and there is, after all, only so much time in the day.

I’m making a reminder now to update my status every two months. Time to plan out a schedule to reach these goals…

Happy New Year!