I’m just looking at my post from last year “looking forward to 2013”! I’m still in a hands-on development role, but now in a different company. Many of my goals for last year are still relevant for this year. Time management has to be right at the top of them; getting the right work/life balance whilst doing a job you love is always difficult; even more so when there is just so much new cool stuff you want to learn!
The delivery process is another key item for this year. Being in a pure software house, delivering working software promptly to clients is not just something to aim for but the key to the success of the business. Whilst the 2-week sprints of scrum might not work, the short delivery cycles and early visibility have to be a good thing. Reducing the time and effort required to develop a working prototype of the screens/system is also something else to look to improve on.
On the technology front, I hope we are quickly proficient in developing and publishing iOS and Android applications; not just on phones but tablets as well. The cloud is also going to be quite important in 2014! So 2014 is shaping up to be a great year for learning new skills and languages. Personally I’d like to look at learning F# and at least one new database language (either a graph database or noSQL).
I’ve been hosting my blog on Blogger for the past 10 years. For the past couple of years, I’ve been looking at rebooting my blog, trying to decide whether to stick with Blogger, write my own blog platform (like all developers at some point) or move onto WordPress. I’ve never needed to set up a WordPress site previously, so this seemed to be the perfect chance to learn something new! So, my new blog will . . .
I’ve picked up my own .dev domain and have set up a very basic website at paulhadfield.dev. The site is hosted in Azure and I’ve set up continuous integration/deployment up in DevOps pipelines. As well as scratching that itch of creating my own website, something I’ve been talking about for a while, it will allow me to learn more about various Azure technologies. This is part of my plan to look into becoming a certified . . .