I have other goals for this year, but this post is about what I want to do for my interest in programming.

Read More

For some reason, I didn’t to a lot of technical reading in the last year. I’m not sure why that happened, but I will try to do better this year. I would like to try to read at least one technical book per month, and to keep up with my reading of articles and tutorials online, as well as technical magazines.

Try Something New

Languages

I’ve spent much of the last few years writing code in VB.NET, C#, PHP, and Java. They are all good languages in their own way, but after a while tend to almost run together, as they are rather similar…OK, VB is the odd one out, but still.

I want to shake things up a bit by learning a new language that is sufficiently different from those I work with already.

There are some that have been gathering interest on the web in recent times, including, but not limited to, Ruby, Python, and F#. I am going to have to pick one – not sure which yet – and read more about it, try to write some code with it, and see where I get.

Tools/Techniques

Besides languages, there are so many useful programming tools out there, both commercial and open source. I have chronicled a learning process of a number of tools in the past year, including Subversion, NAnt, NUnit, FxCop, NDepend, and NCover. I intend to keep this up. I plan to learn, and write about, mocking tools, dependency injection containers, and the Resharper productivity tool.

There are also numerous programming techniques and methodologies out there. I have much work to do in this regard. Planned learning and writing includes design patterns, dependency injection and inversion of control, test-driven development, mocking, continuous integration, and model-view-controller.

Get Involved

I’ve always been on the sideline of the programming scene in that I haven’t been involved in any community projects or events. Probably because I was busy learning how to code!

I want to step up my programming capabilities and involvement by joining an open source project. I don’t know which yet, as there are so many. I have gotten much use out of various OS tools, and would like to give back to some of those projects.

Get Certified

Certifications are a way to show that someone is capable in a certain field or with a certain technology. So far as programming goes, certifications are available for many programming languages and platforms. A certificate is gained by passing a written test on the subject, and preparation for the test involves much studying and practicing.

I would like to gain a certificate in either PHP or .NET, because the process will have me doing much reading and learning, not just for the test, but for the future as well.

Conclusion

Well, there are some goals for me to achieve in the next twelve months. It seems ambitious, but I think it is doable. There will be much work involved, but I will be all the better for it at the end. It does help that I am an avid reader and a continuous learner.

It will be interesting to look back at this post a year from now and see how many of the goals I manage to achieve!