mgroves

Well, I’ve been neglecting this blog for some time now. But starting in 2010, you will see some more activity here.

Why? It’s not a New Year’s Resolution, per se (because I think those are silly), but it’s more to do with the mentoring program I’m involved in at work.

See, Quick Solutions matches up programmers with a mentor that acts as a professional resource, career advisor, etc. Mine has asked me to make some concrete, measurable goals to accomplish over the next year, and here they are:

• Read books: I will be reading around 2 books related to my profession every quarter (for instance, the first one is What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design by Meilir Page-Jones. As I read these books, I will be blogging about them to a) demonstrate my progress, and b) share what I’ve learned.
• I will be taking the PMP exam in February. Not really blog related, but you might see something about it.
• Contribute in a meaningful way to an open source project. I’ve already been accepted as a contributor to the PHPExcel project (believe it or not), and I’ve already contributed a patch to it. You may see some posts about my contributions, and what I’ve learned from them.
• I’ve thought about writing up a whitepaper/case study on the various mobile application marketplaces. There are 3 major marketplaces now for mobile apps, and I’m wondering what the advantages/disadvantages are for each. What is the pricing like, what are the platforms like, what are the marketplace restrictions, etc. I would certainly blog about that.
• I plan to give at least 3 presentations within the company and/or the local developer community. I’ve already done an intro to CakePHP presentation for the local PHP meetup group, and I’m scheduled to give it internally again. I’d also like to learn more about db4o (and giving a presentation on it is a great way to learn). I haven’t come up with another topic yet. (By the way, if you have a local group you’d like me to speak to about these topics, let me know).
• I will be attending conferences and seminars at a similar rate to last year, including: CodeMash, Stir Trek, Central Ohio Day of .NET (CODODN), and various Firestarter events and user groups, and what not.
• I plan to tackle one CodeKata or Project Euler project every 2 weeks for the entirety of the year. I’ll probably do the CodeKata’s in C# and Project Euler’s in some other language (F#, Ruby, PHP, etc). This will represent a large portion of my blogging activity, and will probably be very boring for you non-programmers. Sorry about that.

There are some other things that are part of the plan, but they really are more internal to Quick Solutions, and thus I won’t be blogging about them.

I mention all of this in the hopes that doing so will keep me somewhat accountable: if I don’t do all these things, then it will look rather silly and pathetic for this post to constantly be on the main page of my blog.