Technology resolutions for the New Year by jgn on Friday, December 30, 2011 in Technology

I know most people make resolutions to lose weight, to have a sunnier disposition, to not kill kittens, etc., but I think this year some technology resolutions are appropriate.

To wit . . . in no particular order. My goal is to accomplish 5 after the first one (which is mandatory!).

  1. Attend at least one European technology conference, and/or a medical technology conference.
  2. Don't do any non-Iora contracting or proprietary development for friends or former colleagues, no matter how interesting the project is; only open source, which should emerge from Iora. I'll allow a couple of projects to be grandfathered-in to a small extent, but that's it.
  3. Freshen at least one legacy project with guidance from Working Effectively with Legacy Code.
  4. Present at a Ruby conference.
  5. Don't let myself or others build in excess of the story.
  6. Be more persuasive in opposition when I observe myself or others using APIs and/or techniques that are costly (in time or money) or inappropriate. I went down the rabbit hole a bit this year with Google Calendar integration, against my better judgement.
  7. Tighten up my Linux/OS/X and vim dotfiles. I've never used a pre-fab dotfiles and have my own, but it's time to look over what's out there and integrate some new features. Bonus: Stop using the arrow keys in vim. Use standard vim movement bindings instead.
  8. Sharpen up my Scheme. Be able to write the major combinators without consulting an authority.
  9. Cover more "hard cases" for BDD. I allowed too many specs to be more shallow than I know is proper.
  10. Think about how I can productively contribute to hacktivism and/or "digital humanities" -- I have a lot of latent knowledge and experience in this area, and it's time to revive it. Why should the kids have all the fun?
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