2013 in numbers

• 43+ conference videos watched
• 24 books read (7 of them more or less "technical" in subject)
• 8 posts on this blog
• 7 .NET user group meetings
• 6 conferences attended: 33rd Degree, 4developers, GeeCON (and awesome GeeCON Train), DevDay, dotNetConf PL (online), BuildStuff

Learning

24 books is much less than 39 in 2012 when I made a resolution to read 1 book per week. I suppose this time I'll give up. Those 7 "technical" books were:

• Shawn Wildermuth "The Opinionated Software Developer"
• Richard L. Brandt "One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com"
• Paul Graham "Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age"
• Abel Avram, Floyd Marinescu "Domain-Driven Design Quickly"
• Martin Fowler, Kent Beck "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code"
• Nicholas Carr "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"
• Axel Rauschmayer "The Past Present and Future of JavaScript"

I realize this is a low number but from the other hand it was compensated with conferences and videos. Anyhow I hope to improve a little bit this time as my "to read" shelf is frighteningly long. Also "read" label doesn't accurately show my interests. For the whole year I've been pursuing 3 goals:

• Learn Objective-C ("And Now for Something Completely Different" idea)
• Improve my VIM skills - I'm proudly (Vs)VIM guy :)
• Get proficient in git

I've been steadily learning & practicing with help from following books:

• iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
• Pro Git
• Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought

I'm not finished with them yet but I'm close.

Day job

At work I almost completely moved from old (C++/WebForms) technologies to "new" ones (ASP.NET MVC/JavaScript). I think ASP.NET MVC is the first framework I really know inside out. I had glimpses of how WebForms page cycle works and wrote whole lot of code which I don't understand now :). This pattern repeated in the past with Java and C++/MFC framework. Now I take care more about learning both internals and the big picture. And I prefer simpler things which leads to this year's epiphany: I fell in love with JavaScript. Although Visual Studio/R#/NCrunch is indeed very powerful combo I tend to use bare bones VIM for JavaScript (with help of tools like Karma/tin.cr). And finally I switched from SVN to git for most of the projects. I really enjoy our company's low key attitude and family like atmosphere. My "technical lead" role gave me a lot of fun and opportunities to pursue new ideas. But... things aren't always bright. It was my 10th anniversary with the company and sometimes I feel burned out. Driving technical change ain't easy. I did a lot of code reviews and whiteboard talks but gave only one longer presentation - which is a shame. I should have done more pair programming instead of reviews. Conferences and chats with other developers gave me many insights how can I improve on that field in the near future. Our Great New System appears to be "2+ years rewrite" with overwhelming work still ahead. I wasn't involved in the decision to go the full rewrite route but finger-pointing doesn't help. I had some bad experience with 2 years of hacking behind the closed doors at my startup and I could add my two cents. But doing something new without looking back sounded so cool... Maybe I'm too negative. I just need to focus more on "done done" side of things. Remember: "Real artists ship".

Night shift

I'm done with it. Really done done :).

Summary

For me the main theme of 2013 was socializing. I've been to six conferences and I plan to beat this number in 2014. I met great people and had a lot of fun. Thank you guys!