We’re 1/3rd of the way through 2009. How am I doing on my goals for the year? Let’s see (comments in italics after each goal):

Books

  1. Code Complete - Steve McConnell (yep, I’ve never actually read it)    No progress.
  2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Martin Fowler    Ordered and on my bookshelf.
  3. Domain Driven Design - Erick Evans    About half way through - good stuff!
  4. Working Effectively With Legacy Code - Robert Martin    No progress.

Tools/Techniques/Processes @ Work

  • NHibernate and all its trimmings (FluentNHibernate, LINQ to NHibernate, etc), which I’ll need on a project here real soon.  Done (though with NHibernate, learning is always ongoing!)
  • Actually move from CC.NET to Team City (last attempt didn’t go so well).  No progress.
  • Build a more robust build script and management process - including production deployment scenarios.   Worked on the script and have a very basic one up and running. The build portion needs a lot more refinement before I get anything more advanced in there though.
  • 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.  No progress as we haven’t needed any yet.

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.    Our meetings were/are halted for a bit, but I think an intro IoC/DI presentation when they pick back up in a bit is in order.
  • Have at least one meeting of the CantonALT.NET group and see if it can ever get up on its feet.   No progress.
  • The two blog posts per month target John put out there seems doable, so I’ll borrow it :)    Sorta keeping on target - I didn’t really have two substantial ones in March, but I made up for it (just in time yesterday!) by doing 3 in April.
  • At least 3 feature/patch submissions to open source projects.  Submitted quite a few patches (some small, some a bit meatier) to the MVC Contrib project and one (yet unaplied) one to the xVal project. So while I guess this goal is technically met, I’d still like to do something of a little more substance to push myself.

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.  Down a bit to 116. Hey, it’s a start!

Starting on the reading was good, but only half a book in two months is pretty sad. Everything else is more or less on schedule, but I need to start thinking about that CantonALT.NET meeting (or something similar).

I’ll update again in the begining of July.