When I first started writing this blog, I devoted several posts to planning and describing my efforts to become a better developer.

Although I was inspired by a certain unnamed developer’s public quest to read a book a week for six months, I never chose reading technical books as one of my goals.

I’m not sure why I didn’t consider reading technical books as a worthwhile endeavor at the time. Perhaps it was because I was overly infatuated by my RSS reader or maybe I was just fixated on the burgeoning list of tools, frameworks, and open source projects that I had only recently become aware of after finally branching out from my Microsoft-centric comfort zone.

Whatever the reason, I now find myself with a very different perspective on what will help me grow the most as a developer.

For one thing, after reflecting on my own strengths and weaknesses I realized that I have been focusing on breadth of knowledge for too long and now need to concentrate on increasing my depth of knowledge about software development. I decided the best way to remedy this current imbalance was to embark on a methodical journey to finally read the dozen or more high quality books on software development that I currently have collecting dust on my shelves.

My 2010 professional goal is to read one of the technical books in the picture below each month for twelve months and then do a blog post reviewing each one.

When I first hatched this plan a few months ago, I put some serious thought into the best way to ensure that I would actually meet this goal. I knew that publicly announcing an ambitious goal would provide some motivation, but probably wouldn’t be enough, especially since I have been apt to abandon blogging for 4-5 month stretches these days.

Instead, I opted to take the SMART approach, which is acronym that describes the characteristics of well formed goals. I first read about in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware and was impressed how such a simple concept really helped me to refine my goals in ways that made me much more likely to achieve them.

How did I make my goal SMART?

• S – Specific – I didn’t just make a vague statement about reading more technical books. Instead I went to the trouble of picking out exactly how many and which ones I was going to read (although I left the order unspecified to give me a little bit of freedom to pursue what was most interesting or relevant to me at the time).
• M – Measurable – Writing a blog post review after finishing each book not only serves as a clear finish line for each monthly goal, but also provides a good way to mentally assimilate the information in each book from a SQ3R reading perspective.
• A – Achievable – I didn’t want to make myself miserable for a year with unrealistic demands on my time, so I sat down and thought about the maximum number of hours I could realistically spend doing technical reading in a week (10 hr) as well as how many pages I average an hour on technical reading (25 pg) and how long my biggest books were (800 pg). After doing the math, I figured out that I could realistically handle one book a month, especially if I alternated between easy and challenging books. So far I’ve validated my hypothesis by successfully tackling one of my toughest books in January, CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter, and also being ahead of schedule for finishing my February book, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
• R – Relevant – Besides addressing my concerns about focusing too much on breadth of knowledge and not enough on depth, I also found these goals to be particularly relevant to me because I had just received 6 new ones in the mail due to my amazon gift certificate windfall that I got from taking JP Boodhoo’s Nothing But .NET class last fall and thus was suffering from a nasty spike of unread book guilt.
• T – Time-Boxed – Setting clear time deadlines is essential in order in terms of both motivation and measuring success. I chose one month reading iterations because they were easy to track (my January book is…) and it kept me on a brisk yet sustainable pace.

As I already mentioned, I’ve completed one of my books so I’m off to work on my first review.

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