In 2008

Well, 2008 was not a really interesting year for me. Not much happened outside of my regular routine.

I did keep up with occasional writing on the blog. Entries were added regularly, though not on any set schedule. Early in the year, I started a weekly posting of interesting or useful links collected in the past week. This is common on other blogs I read, and the reading material provided by those has been worthwhile, so I decided to do my own.

I didn’t get to attend any technology conferences this year. I would have liked to attend the Web Directions North conference like I did last year, but that didn’t happen. I did attend a day-long code camp held at the university earlier this year. It was the first time I had attended such an event, and it was quite worthwhile.

I kept working on the photography skills this year. I live in a part of the city where there is much to see within walking distance, so I had a tendency to go for walks with my camera. This gave me access to much subject material, really anything of interest. Many of these photos have been added to my gallery, and I have more to get uploaded. So feel free to have a look! I also added two new lenses to my camera bag, a normal lens and a wide angle lens. Have been quite happy with both.

Building and refining my programming skills has been one of my primary focuses. I have learned much about code analysis, metrics, unit testing, and code coverage. I have also been migrating some of my various projects into source control using Subversion. This is great for me since it is easy to keep project files synchronized between my desktop and laptop computers. I’ve done much work with PHP and .NET – they seem to have been my languages of choice this year.

Also, regarding .NET specifically, I recently stopped using 1.0 and made sure all my .NET projects are using 2.0 as a baseline. This makes switching between projects easier, and the projects themselves are easier to work on thanks to all the improvements and additions 2.0 provided.

I’ve been working on learning the Adobe CS3 products. The CS3 suite is a nice package, containing useful software for different graphics and media tasks. Adobe released CS4 in October; I looked at the details of the new release, and decided to skip the CS4 upgrade. Going to CS3 was a great upgrade, I got a lot out of it, but I decided that CS4 didn’t have enough changes and new features to be worth the cost of the upgrade. I will more likely upgrade when CS5 appears.

The last big thing for me this year was launching a new design for my site. The previous design (if you can call it that!) had been intended as an interim one, but it stayed up a lot longer than I had intended. I finally got to tear that one down and put up the new look, which I am much happier with.

In 2009

The most immediate item coming up is the TechDays conference in Vancouver on January 21 and 22. I have been booked since I found out it was happening, and am really looking forward to it. It is unusual for an event of that size and caliber to be held in Canada, and even more so on the west coast. I decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up!

Over the length of the year, I plan to keep working on my programming skills. I want to start using NHibernate for .NET, and learn to use the dependency injection and inversion of control patterns, where appropriate, in my various projects. There will likely be more articles appearing on this site on those subjects, and more, once I have something to write about.

I need to start using one of the PHP frameworks that are available. I am too used to writing the same code multiple times, and need to take advantage of prefab libraries that contain most of the functionality. Further to this, I want to start learning another programming language. I have read brief introductions to both Python and Ruby, and think one of those two will likely be my next target.

I also plan to keep working on the photography skills, keep taking pictures and experimenting with composition and lighting effects.

Conclusion

Well, 2008 is a wrap. It is time to sit back and wait for the stroke of midnight…

Happy New Year!