I have taken the last few years off from posting my goals, but I don't see any reason not to start up again. I'm not really one for resolutions, mostly because of their binary nature: either you succeed or you fail. Life is rarely like that. Goals are more my style: even if you don't get to 100% of your goal, you can still get 96% there, and that's something!
Since I didn't make official goals for 2011, here's a quick list of things I did this year that I'm pleased with:
- My second son, Ethan, was born in January, and in the last few weeks he's been starting to walk!
- I really started taking reading seriously. I read 23.333 books in 2011 (My goal was 24, and I'm still finishing up the last one). Getting a Kindle definitely helped with this.
- I released 4 updates to my various Mango Blog plugins.
- I presented on the CFMeetup (online) and at CF.Objective()
- I really started taking Git seriously, and it has been a boon of productivity. I'll never go back to SVN if I don't have to!
- I released my first near-native mobile app, The Squeeze, for BlackBerry Playbook. (I've since given up on the platform, but we still use our Playbook, because it's the best video camera we have.)
- I upgraded from a 13" Macbook to a 15" Macbook Pro. Buying used is definitely a good way to save money, but there are some pitfalls.
- I wrote an article for the Adobe Developer Center for Flex 3 developers who need to update their knowledge to Flex 4/4.5.
- Compadre Steve Rittler and I created, organized, and ran Philly Merge, a one day regional conference (Philadelphia) "For Entrepreneur-Developers and Developer-Entrepreneurs".
- I fell in love with TDD all over again when I realized how necessary it is to work on fragile setups, like those I was creating with ColdFusion's ORM.
- I participated in the How I Got Started in ColdFusion meme.
- I finally figured out freaking SPF records in DNS. Geez.
- While I haven't yet released Taffy 1.1, which was definitely a goal for 2011, I did get RC1 out the door and all that remains before 1.1 is officially released is to write more documentation.
- I created a GitHub "organization" dedicated to helping fill the gaps in CFScript.
- I proved once and for all why Tabs are Superior to Spaces!
Now, the fun part, my goals for 2012:
- Finally release Taffy 1.1. I really want this one done in the next month or two.
- Read 24 books. I felt like this was an incredible pace last year. Two books a month is still a pretty high goal for me.
- Do well in my presentation for CFObjective this year.
- Attend JSConf 2012 (no date announced yet). If there were only one language that I need to know aside from ColdFusion (and let's face it, there's more than that), it's JavaScript. 2011 saw my JS skills greatly improve, and the next step is definitely to continue reading about it and to start attending training/conferences.
- Continue doing Yoga regularly. I started doing Yoga (again) in November or December of 2011 and it's been a great workout and really improves my flexibility and balance. My favorite video to follow is very fast paced, too, so I get a bit of a cardio workout in the process.
- Lose some weight. My metabolism is finally catching up with me (or I with it?)... and I'm starting to tip the scales into the overweight category. At least, it feels that way given the way the weight is distributed. Mostly I need to work on my gut. I would be thrilled to lose about 10 pounds, especially if the majority of it came from the mid-section.
- Make Philly Merge 2012 a reality.
- Watch the Phillies take the World Series trophy back. Ok, so this one is mostly out of my control. Except for the watching part. But I will take my part seriously!
Did I miss anything obvious?
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January 02 2012
In Be the Change I wrote about a new open source "organization" (the official GitHub term, not like a company or anything) and project I started on GitHub -- CFScript Community Components -- to help flesh out the script components that come with ColdFusion 9.
I'm thrilled to report that since then a few people have submitted patches (thank you both!), and I've made a number of changes myself. But I am particularly proud of the change I pushed last night. Instead of adding a missing tag, I fixed a bug in an existing one.
CFQUERY: Anything other than a space after a named query parameter (including a newline, tab, parenthesis, etc) causes an exception to be thrown.
If you write anything like my code, you might get an error that looks like this:
Parameter 'since_id\n\t\t\t\torder' not found in the list of parameters specified
... which is the result of:
select ...
from ...
where
id > :since_id
order by ...
And of course the problem is that I have a line-break immediately following my named parameter, "since_id".
But thankfully the bug is now fixed, and the fix is available to you, free of charge.
Maybe I'm a little crazy, but this makes me really excited. This is affecting change. This is a perfect example of why I started this project.
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December 19 2011
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All you have to do is click some buttons and send some emails. It only takes a minute.
Do it, or the bunny gets it!
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December 13 2011
Shamefully, I read Ender's Game for the first time in October of this year.
I know, I know. I said it was shameful.
It was, and of course you already know this, @%$#@ EPIC!
Now I'm in a little bit of a bind. You see, I have to read them all, but they weren't published in chronological order. So which way makes more sense?
At first I was going to go through and try and list them in the two orders, but that's bordering on impossible for the format I would have used. Of course, Wikipedia kind of nails it:
Chronology of Enderverse stories. Numbers in parentheses are years of first publication. Novels are in blue and short stories are in red. Question marks indicate a work that has been announced but not yet published.
... no simple matter. On one hand, it kind of makes sense to read them in chronological order, to follow the characters. I mean... you wouldn't watch a movie series out of order, would you?
But on the other hand, to get the original experience of someone following the series as it was published, one would read them in publishing order. They even have separate lists on Goodreads (Chrono, Pub). (It's still easier to read the chart above though, isn't it?)
Right now I'm leaning toward chronological order, to make it a little easier on myself. But what do all of you lifetime bookworms have to say to me, the noob bookworm? Also, unless someone vouches for the epicness of the Shadow series, I will probably skip that one altogether and stick to the left half of the chart.
What advice do you have, internets?
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December 08 2011
