January 4, 2010 – New Years Resolutions

Always a good idea to write these things down. Even when you do there’s little chance you’ll do it, but it at least it makes you accountable! So from last year..

1. Get better at software testing – Didn’t really do this. Spent a little time getting familiar with some new testing frameworks for Ruby including Cucumber, but ultimately didn’t change the way I work. Not sure if I’ll aim to do that this year either, but still good to strive for.
2. Collective Intelligence – Read through most of this book, and over the code of some of the Netflix. Plan to try my hand at the next Netflix prize using my Mac Mini (which has a lot of spare process time). Still tiny amount of CPU compared to whats required for optimal results, but I’m not renting out a cloud to learn. Didn’t do much coding on this front – just learning.
3. Get used to git – Got this one down. We use git at work, and I moved my private projects over to git as well. Can’t imagine going back to SVN or CVS after using distributed version control.

One and a half out of three isn’t bad – for the tech resolutions at least. As for 2009 I’m keeping it more simple:

1. Get awesome at Ruby – I’m decent at Ruby, but still not the point I’d like. This is mostly because of how I learned it (through Rails). I don’t have the knowledge to build something like rails though which is where I’d like to be. Have some ruby design pattern books to read, and planning on reading a lot more of other peoples code on GitHub to help with this.
2. Read more books, less web – My reading over the past year went almost entirely to single serving sizes. Reddit, Hacker News, Google Reader, etc. I read almost no books over the last 12 months. I’m going to make a conscience effort to not linger on sites like this, and instead unplug to read stuff I’ve been wanting to read.
3. Continue weeding out stuff – There’s still a lot of stuff in our garage/attic that I’d like to weed out. This means lots of donations and sales online – just need to keep doing it bit by bit.
4. Get in better shape… a little – I don’t really care to “lose x pounds” or “go to the gym 3x a week”, but I wouldn’t mind getting in a bit better shape. Maybe the occasional jog (once a week?), and the occasional kettlebells (also once a week). That’s plenty improvement for me.
5. Release projects! – This is a broad goal, but I want to release more sites. That is develop, deploy and release projects that solve real world problems. This also includes releasing more code open source that I can extract out of current projects. There’s one I started at the end of 2009 – MovieFly; which will basically do the same thing as my old Dymension.org movies list; but also allows tracking of when you saw movies and with who. I want it to be a place where people can review, rate and track when they saw movies, and be able to export them out of the system – something any other service locks you into. I’ve had a few status updates on Facebook done from MovieFly in the past weeks to try it out. Can’t do too much right now other than track when you’ve seen movies, but that’s better than most facebook apps. :p Slowly adding features now, but it’s more of a “do whatever’s needed” kind of approach.

That’s the main focus of this year! Get better at programming, and program for stuff that’s actually going to see the light of day, minimize/unclutter, make healthy choices and read more.