Even though we are halfway through the first month of the new year, I thought it would still be a good time to bring up my programming-related New Year’s resolutions.  With the way the landscape in programming changes every few years it seems only appropriate to encourage personal growth.  I have found previously when I do this it also strengthens the languages that I already know.  Learning Rails re-inforced the idea not only of testing, which is stongly built-in to the framework, but also concepts like MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture and DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) concepts.  Here’s what I have set as personal goals for 2009:

• Learn a new language.  I’ve previously worked in mostly Java and Perl, with a bit of Ruby on Rails thrown in.  So I could claim Ruby on Rails and still learn a lot (for that matter, Perl as well…) but I want to challenge myself and try to learn Python.  Initially, there seems to be a good deal of overlap between Python, Ruby and Perl, so I think that should help me.  I will start with Dive into Python as that has a complete textbook online.
• Learn 2 new frameworks.  I have not completely decided on what to do here.  Looking at our biblios project makes  me want to learn Google Gears.  If I learn Python, Django, a web framework similar to Rails, would blend nicely.  Catalyst might be a great fit that could directly impact Koha.
• Contribute to one other open-source project or consistently attend a code group.  These will probably go together.  Here in Atlanta, where I live, there are groups for all the languages and most of the frameworks that I’ve mentioned above.  They tend to meet once a month and often have side meetings to work through learning aspects or book clubs related to the topic at hand.  It’s a great way to meet people and learn what others are doing in the same field of interest. Meetup.com is where I found the Rails group I (very) infrequently attend and actually heard about the Perl Mongers group in the area that I’m hoping to attend this year. Often, you can find people in need of help for various projects, or who are looking to help if you have a project of your own that needs help.  Meetup is international and it’s very easy to start your own group if one isn’t already meeting. Maybe I’ll even start a Koha group??

So feel free to share your goals or resolutions in the coming year in the comments below, or even the methods you use to improve yourself.

Tags: Google, Koha, Perl, Python, rubyonrails

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 2:29 pm by Allen Reinmeyer and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.