Retrospective of 2009, Planning for 2010

After the Kaizenconf of 2008, I wrote down a couple of things I wanted to learn throughout 2009. Looking back at that list for the past year, I think I did fairly well.

Retrospective of 2009

• I learned more about integration patterns and ESB?s. I also learned about NServiceBus and I?m going to take this a few steps further in 2010. I?m hoping to get some real-world experience with a true Service-Oriented Architecture.
• StructureMap is now my IoC container of choice.
• I definitely learned a lot about NHibernate this year and I?m still a huge fan. I?m also looking forward to see what NHibernate 3.0 will bring to the table in 2010.
• Thanks to the European VAN presentations of Greg Young on DDD and Mark Nijhof?s CQRS sample application, I learned a tremendous deal about Domain-Driven Design. I finally understand some of the stuff that Greg Young and Udi Dahan are talking about for a couple of years now. 
• I (re)learned HTML/XHTML and picked up some basic knowledge about CSS during the last couple of weeks. My goal is not to become a CSS jedi, but I just want to have enough knowledge and experience in order to prevent the most obvious rookie mistakes.
• I took my first baby-steps in Ruby earlier this year, but I definitely need more study and practical use in order to become a more proficient user.

There?s some stuff on the list that I didn?t managed to learn about:

• JavaScript and jQuery
• Lean/Kanban
• F#

On the the other hand, I was able to learn about CouchDB and the NoSQL movement. I also learned a significant deal about RESTful architectures.

I also gained a lot of experience with WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) throughout the year, but I regret to say that it was mostly negative than positive. I don?t think that I?m going to consider this technology again in its current state. Maybe I?ll reconsider it again after it further matures.

Planning for 2010

Hereby the stuff I want to learn more about in 2010:

• Continue exploring NServiceBus and using it in a real-world project.
• Web development is something that I want to become more familiar with. JavaScript and jQuery are still high on the list, but I also want to take an in-depth look at some of the web development frameworks out there. I?m looking forward to learning about ASP.NET MVC, Fubu MVC, Django, OpenRasta and Ruby on Rails.
• Following my new motto of learning one NoSQL database each year, this year I?m going to take a closer look at MongoDB.
• Following the same credo applied on programming languages,  I?m currently very interested in learning Clojure, and not only because it can also target the CLR. As already mentioned, I also want to become more proficient at Ruby.
  

  Community

  On the community side, I?ll continue to co-organize the European VAN meetings with Colin Jack. We?ll try to do them on a more regular basis. I also hope to put out more blog posts in 2010 than I did in 2009. In 2007 and 2008 I managed to write ~100 blog posts a year. This past year, I didn?t even manage to publish half of that and I?m not very pleased with that. While I was evaluating the past year, I?ve come to some conclusions about what might be causing this. Maybe I?ll get back to this in a later blog post.

Well, there you have it. I would love to hear about some of the things that you, my dear readers, are planning to learn in 2010. I wish you all a happy and successful new year.