2008 was a pretty good year: I left a job where the path forward was to abandon my .Net skills in favor of learning Java, and returned to Progress Energy to develop and support .Net applications. I was elected President of TriNUG, and given the opportunity to stop whining and start making TriNUG better. I started using Twitter, and really grew my community of peers by dozens.
I feel like if I don't put something down for where I want to be at the end of 2009, I will spend much of the year drifting about. So here are my goals for 2009:
- Work: I would like to make more of an impact on what our group does technically at Progress. I'd like to see if I can help push adoption of Entity Framework and jQuery, possibly through helping facilitate discussions or brown bags during the year.
- TriNUG: I'd like for us to get the rest of the year ironed out for speakers, first, so I have less to worry about. Then, I'd like for us to do a CodeCamp even better than our last. I also need to improve the meeting experience for new users, and find ways to reach folks we aren't currently.
- Blue Hill: I need to get serious about my side consulting/dev work. At the very least I need some demonstrations of what I can do for folks unfamiliar with me. To that end:
- WhoDoesWhatIDo.com: A site for developers to build peer groups and career networking around skills and tools. Currently vaporware. I'd like to have this in beta by third quarter and released by end of year. Plan is to build it using ASP.Net MVC and NHibernate
- Learning: I'd like to end the year with a solid understanding of Ruby and Rails. I also want to be better versed in ASP.Net MVC, jQuery, and NHibernate. I also need to learn to type, so help me God.
- Conferences: This is more of a 2010 goal now, but I'm going to CodeMash if it kills me.