CodeClimber

At the beginning of this year I write a “New Year’s Resolutions” post, and I promised I would have kept you updated with the progress. I did it at the beginning of April (end of Q1 report) and now this is post is about the second quarter of 2009.

• Personal Resolutions
  • Go back Climbing – This was probably the most successful part of Q2: if you followed my tweets, you might have noticed that I started climbing again: bouldering in Switzerland, 4 days of climbing in Arnad (VdA), more climbing in the beautiful Val Masino, a walk on a glacier on Mont Gelè (still in Valle d’Aosta) and finally (even if already in July) the wonderful granite walls of Val Malenco.
  • Take part in one triathlon competition – I’m still training (also climbed up the Maloja Pass), but slacked up a bit. I didn’t make it to the July competition: I might do a triathlon in September, in Locarno, Switzerland, but still not fully convinced yet.
• Blogging and community involvement Resolutions
  • Blog more tutorials and technical articles – I published the results of survey about the usage of Ajax among .NET developers, and some posts about ASP.NET MVC performances (and some follow up posts), extensibility and some what I consider to be a bad practice of development: accessing the Request object inside actions.
  • Opensource development – I started working on some work items for Subtext, but that’s it.
  • Produce some content about ASP.NET MVC in Italian – I recorded 3 webcasts about ASP.NET MVC for MSDN Italy, and more will come after the summer.
  • Redesign my blog – Unfortunately the blog redesign is still at the phase it was after Q1: design complete, now need to HTML-ize it and make it a Subtext skin.
• Technology Resolutions
  • Enhance my .NET skills – I got a bit more deeper into WCF, but unfortunately that’s all I did in this Q2.
  • Start developing for Mac/iPhone – Nothing new here, but my resolution has been already fulfilled in Q1.
• Unplanned
  • ASPInsider – I became an ASPInsider: it was unexpected and really appreciated. I engaged in a lot of interesting discussions, with a group of very smart people.
  • User Group meetings – I probably should have included this in my 2009 resolutions, as this is probably going to happen more and more this year and for next year. In this Q2 I co-organized the 4th Italian ALT.NET Conference and also I held a session during the conference. And just at the beginning of Q2, in April, I did a presentation about ASP.NET MVC for DotNetUmbria.
  • A bit of self-marketing – It all started with the talk in DotNetUmbria: many people asked for it so, after asking for permission to Chad Myers (which was the original creator of the t-shirt), I printed a few of them, including the logo of my blog, and adding an hidden message encoded into the viewstate on the back. But I think this deserves a post of its own, so I’ll come to this in a few days.
  • ASP.NET MVC Book – The editing phase went on till the end of May, but now the book is over, and will be available in stores soon. If you are interested, the chapter-level table of contents is available.

All in all, this Q2 went pretty well from the personal side of resolutions and in the offline community: blog posts are less that they used to be and mainly technical: twitter is taking away the “easy topics” that probably before would have made into a blog post.

Now that the book is complete and I’ve less talk/conferences ahead, my focus for the the next 2 quarters of the year will be on writing more contents on my blog and more opensource contributions. And hopefully making the new skin for the blog.