I read a number of blog posts where individuals detailed their goals and what they were looking forward to over the coming year.
I like the idea of publicly stating your goals as believe that it can help qualify these in your own mind and make you more committed to achieving them.
I think the career highlights for me last year were:
- Speaking at Remix and TechEd
- Going to MVP conference – although I dont feel I learnt that much from this I enjoyed travelling to Seattle, meeting a few people and seeing the Microsoft Campus
- Udi Dahan’s architecture course opened my mind to some new ideas
- An interesting course on Web Accessibility from Derek Featherstone
- Winning an internal company award for company/community contribution that enables me to go to a conference of my choice
- Getting another book contract from Apress to write on .net 4.5 and Visual Studio 11
- An interesting mobile site project that has just gone live
So my goals for 2012 are the following:
- Understand WCF better – I dont like WCF as it seems way over complex but I should probably make more of an effort as its getting pretty hard to avoid..
- Complete book Apress book on .net 4.5 Visual Studio 11 that I am currently working on (funny how you think you will never do this kind of thing again)
- Create some sort of open source/fun project to keep skills up – enterprise development can be a little depressing at times so think it needs to be some kind of game or something.. 🙂
- More blogging and talks – been a bit lax on this and have come across several useful tips/tricks/gotchas that I want to document
- Run DDD Melbourne again in June/July
On a personal/non technical level I want to do the following:
- Ensure better separation of work/personal life – I got pretty bad at this towards the end of last year and am not going down this route again!
- Found a weight training club with a very experienced trainer – keen to advance in this area as hit a plateau through my own training – the last two sessions have completely smashed me!
- Complete cert 4 personal trainer (cert 3 completed last year)
I am particularly looking forward to the following:
- Visiting UK for 3 weeks
- NDC conference