In January of 2009 I wrote down some goals for the year, so I figure it's appropriate to look back and see what I accomplished from that list and where I fell short; and then set some new goals for this year.

1. Learn Transfer and CF9 Hibernate
   Status? Fail!
   Admittedly, this was a pretty ambitious goal. And while I didn't manage to learn both, I have learned the basics of CF9's new baked-in Hibernate functionality. That's a start. I won't say the lesson here is to be less ambitious, but perhaps a little more realistic?
2. Finish Grub 1.0
   Status? Fail miserably!
   Alas, time got the best of me. While I haven't finished it, I am still working on it. I've renewed my interest by switching to using Git for version control for the project, which makes working on the train much easier. Now if only I could make all of those books, movies, and TV shows that consume my time on the train less interesting…
3. Start Refactoring Grub
   Status? Success!
   Indeed, I have started refactoring. In addition to moving over to Git for version control, I've been rewriting the model behind Grub to use CF9's Hibernate ORM. Luckily, continued work on this goal will go hand in hand with continued work on Goal #1 above.
4. Get started with Flex
   Status? Great Success!
   As a matter of fact, as of last week, a Flex application that I wrote from the ground up is running in production. I have another on the back burner while finishing up the first project, and it seems like I'm really getting the hang of Flex. I look forward to more projects that utilize it.

So yes, I failed. In some cases, spectacularly! Luckily, it's our failures that we learn the most from, not our successes. I can only hope to continue failing so spectacularly, because when I take stock of the last year I feel as though I've learned an incredible amount.

Goals for 2010:

1. Get more better at ORM
   Having a basic understanding shows me the power behind this beast. Now it's time to turn it up to 11 and see how I can increase my productivity.
2. Ship Grub
   Whatever the version number, the version control system, or the architecture of the model… just make it work, get it online, and make it public. Don't stress over the design so much, you can fix that in the next iteration. SHIP IT! SHIP SHIP SHIP SHIP!
3. Continue to grow Philly CFUG back to a large regular attendance
   I don't have any grandiose plans for how to accomplish this, I'm just going to try hard to plan compelling content, communicate well, and hope that if I build it, they will come.
4. Get very comfortable with Git
   The more I work with and learn about Git, the more I like it over Subversion. I don't want to say that it's a hammer capable of driving screws, but at this point I don't see a compelling reason to continue to use SVN, except when you are sharing a repository with other developers who don't know (or want to learn) Git. If nothing else, the GUI's and tools available for SVN are far more mature and compelling than those available for Git, but that will change over time.

I officially moved my blog to this domain today in 2008. Prior to its life on this domain, I was writing this blog as a sub-folder on the domain I use for my family blog, since April of 2007.

So happy 1st birthday, FusionGrokker.com! It's been a fun year. Here's to another.

"Having goals is a pain in the neck… It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals." – Seth Godin**

Being someone who wants to get things done, lead, grow, and make an impact, I think it's time I set some goals. So here in no particular order are some goals I'm setting for myself in 2009. These are only geeky personal goals; things like surviving my first year of fatherhood will go on my other blog.

1. Learn both Transfer and ColdFusion 9's baked in edition of Hibernate. ORM is something I've long wanted to know, and I have a feeling that both will have their place. After all, I know how to use both the CF8 Ajax tags and jQuery Ajax, and both of those have their place. It also doesn't hurt that people who use Transfer with ColdSpring rave about how awesome it is, and I already drank the ColdSpring koolaid…
   
   
2. Finish Grub 1.0, release/publicize it, and hopefully see my first 16 users. (Because even numbers are powers of 2, of course.) I may need to come up with a better domain name as web 2.0-y names have fallen out of favor… Any ideas?
   
   
3. Start work on refactoring Grub, possibly as a 2.0 release. I've learned so much in working towards 1.0 that I'm almost embarrassed by the code. But the most important part is that it works… then we can worry about pretty code. So I'm not letting myself get hung up on imperfect OO-design and instead just focusing on finishing features and fixing bugs to get it up and running.
   
   
4. Install Flex Builder and at least write a hello-world app. Maybe also make that into a hello-world AIR app. I really need to get my behind in gear on this Flex thing. If things work out, maybe I'll develop a Flex front-end for Grub. :)

Those are the most prominent things on my mind lately. I don't want to set too many goals, or I'll never finish them all.

** Yes, I stole the link and inspiration from Joel on Software. I'm sure he's not the first though, just the most prolific.

This year is A List Apart's second year running their Survey For People Who Make Websites. I just completed it (18 pages, average 2-3 questions per page) in about 8 minutes, so what are you waiting for?

I figured since I was finally going to have some proper ColdFusion hosting, I might as well check out the latest and greatest from our various CFML blogging engines. I'd used BlogCFC in the past, so this time I decided to give Mango a test drive. So far, I'm really liking it. Mango has an integrated database setup and the option to import from WordPress exports and BlogCFC. It's apparently got easy but powerful plugin support (which I intend to explore soon), and is supposed to be one of the easier blogs to skin — again, something I intend to explore soon.

With some help from Laura in the Mango support forums, I was able to work through some quirky import issues (pages that belong to a category aren't supported in Mango, but apparently I had them in WP — this was throwing an error during import, should be fixed in an upcoming release, I'm sure) and got all of my old posts and comments imported. I managed to remember what my FeedBurner password was, so I even managed to pull off the switch without upsetting continuity in aggregators like ColdFusionBloggers, Feed Squirrel and AXNA. Although I have to apologize if it ends up causing doubles of anything.

Lastly, I also setup request forwarding from my previous host (on another of my domains still temporarily hosted there) to my new host and domain, pretty much just like Ray did when he moved to ColdFusionJedi.com. Since my old host didn't support SES urls, I had to use the ID from the url to lookup the post title and forward the url to this domain.

So how do you like the new domain? Eh?