Here’s the first half of a whirlwind chronological tour of my past year from the perspective of my blog and technical life:
Jan: Blogging Without a Net – I started off the year with a resolution to cast off the safety net of the massive GeeksWithBlogs blogging collective and venture out on my own. In the process, I pick up a few things on PHP as I tinker with my fancy new WordPress blogging engine.
- Feb: The Post That Launched a Thousand Flames – After getting roughed up a bit on Reddit for a post on programming language trends, I start wondering why .NET developers get no love in the industry and end up writing a post comparing .NET developers to American Tourists. Although the post languished in obscurity for several weeks, it ended up getting over 30,000 hits along with a combined total of 700 comments in the course of just a few days. As you can imagine, it was quite an eye-opening experience for a somewhat newbie blogger like myself.
- Mar: Little Miss CaffeinatedCoder Arrives - At the spritely young age of 36, I become a father for the first time. This was by far the high point of the year for me. It also marked the beginning of a rather lengthy slowdown on the blogging front. To my credit, I did manage to squeeze in an interview with Jeff Atwood at the end of the month. I was thrilled that he responded to my email request and was impressed by the thoughtfulness of his answers.
- April: Networking Nirvana and Geek Rage – I began the month by making the rather egregious mistake of attending the Alt.NET conference in Seattle. The conference itself was amazing and allowed me to finally meet hoards of people who I had been following through my RSS Reader for ages. The mistake was rather in me naively believing my wife when she said it was OK to leave her alone with a 4 week old colicky baby for the weekend in order to attend. I’m still paying for that one…:-) The experience was also slightly tainted by a rather unpleasant exchange with a certain notorious Alt.NET’er in the comment section of my conference retrospective post and then later on twitter. It led me to publish a somewhat bitter post on the topic of geek community and eventually withdraw from twitter (although that decision ultimately had more to do with it being a productivity drain).
- May: I Finally Get Organized - The act of trying to juggle the new demands of fatherhood along with my old interests in blogging and after-hours geek learning made me quickly realize that I was pretty inefficient and unorganized. In a fit of frustration, I picked up a copy of Getting Things Done and worked pretty hard to refactor and hone my organizational skills. I’ve stuck with most of the principals from the book and feel pretty good about relatively low levels of chaos in my life at the moment.
- June: SQL Is for the Birds – We finally take the ORM plunge at work and decide to use Castle’s Active Record as a replacement for our custom data access layer. I manage to get a good month of development time in before the project gets temporarily shelved to work on some legacy projects that took a higher priority. It was sad to have to return to writing raw SQL again, but the experience was positive enough to convince me to that ORM’s have progressed too far to still be spending time on doing manual CRUD.
Next up: my adventures with Ruby on Rails, Subversion, R#, mocking legacy code, and winning some free techie books.
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