I know it’s already 13 days into the new year, but a year cannot start without the usual  retrospective on the year that just ended and with the resolutions for the year that is coming.

Who did 2009 go

Let’s start with evaluating how 2009 go and let’s see if it went as I hoped at the beginning of last year. I already did 2 intermediate checkpoints, one at the end of Q1 and one in mid Summer.

  • Personal Resolutions:
    • Go Back Climbing - I climbed during Q2, but then when we came back from our summer holidays in Hokkaido we didn’t go climbing any more. Overall I did a bit of climbing, but not as much as I wanted to. NEUTRAL
    • Take Part in one Triathlon Competition - part of the reason why I didn’t climb a lot after summer is because I trained for a triathlon. Actually I even did two of them, one at the beginning of September in Locarno, Switzerland and one at the end of September, in Alba. I didn’t finish in last position, but around the middle of the ranking, which is not bad since I train when I can, and don’t follow a strict planning. My best part is the cycling one, and I’m really bad at running. GOOD
  • Blogging and community involvement Resolutions:
  • Technology Resolutions:
    • Enhance my .NET skills – I planned to study more jQuery, more Linq, more Expression tree and IoC. At the end of the year I didn’t studied anything about the Expression tree and Linq (but now I can do it with the help of Justin Etheredge and his Mastering Linq series on TekPub), but I worked a bit on WCF and lately I’m playing with NHibernate (that even if used it 2 years ago I had to “relearn” it) and FluentNH. GOOD
    • Start developing for Mac/iPhone – I did a prototype of a e-banking application for Avanade in the first months of 2009: enough to see that developing on the iPhone is great for the usability stand point, but a bit strange and complicate from the coding stand point (Objective-C is a bit weird). GOOD
  • Unplanned:
    • UserGroup Meetings – I organized 2 UGIALT.NET events, I spoke at 3 different UserGroup meeting, and I attended the StackOverflow DevDays in London.
    • ASP.NET MVC Book - the book took longer then expected and was available in stores only in August. Also, a free refcard has been published in September.
    • Trip to Hokkaido – I didn’t expect I would have gone to Japan, but at the end we did it, and Hokkaido is a great place. I really like Japan.
    • Cross-Country Skiing: I already started xc-skiing in 2008, but only in December, when I bought a new set of skating ski I really got fond of XC-Skiing.

So, just 1 FAIL, 3 GOOD and 4 NEUTRAL. 2009 didn’t went great, but at least aligned with my expectations after all.

My resolutions for 2010

This year I want to reiterate the experiment: I think it helped me evaluate how the year was going and helped keep me focused with what I planned to do.

  • Personal Resolutions
    • Climbing - Last year I didn’t climb as much as I wanted (even if more than the year before): in 2010 I’d try climb a bit more.
    • Triathlon - Last year I really enjoyed doing triathlons, lots of nice people at the races. And I think it’s also a good way to stay fit: know, running,cycling and swimming. I don’t want to get too mad about this, but doing the Locarno race again and maybe another one would be great. And I’ve to focus more on the running leg of the race since my current 5 min/km (8:03 min/mile) takes me to the bottom of the run leg ranking.
    • XC-Skiing – I just started using the skating technique, and I hope I can go XC-Skiing more and acquire a bit more of technique (and hopefully stamina) before the end of this skiing season.
  • Blogging and community involvement Resolutions:
    • Redesign my blog – number one priority is finalizing my new blog design before it becomes outdated. Daniela was very proactive and last year she designed it following the 2010 design trends, but not sure if they will last till 2012.
    • Write an eBook – Last year I helped publish one, but this year I’d like to publish one myself: maybe about ASP.NET MVC v2 or about Lucene.net
    • Be more constant in my blogging – Even if I published a good number of technical post, in 2009 I was not very constant: I had prolific periods followed by one month or more of less technical blogging. This year I’d like to be more constant.
    • Make a better blog - Last year I bought the book 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, I read it, followed some of its advices, but never stuck to a plan. (BTW, if you are interested, if you buy the book by Tuesday 19th you get 3 cool bonus)
    • Subtext – One of the reason I started working on Subtext 5 years ago is because I wanted plugins: two years ago we kind of added them, but then something bad happened, we had to revert back, and we lost everything: next year I want to add plugin support to Subtext.
    • Produce more content in Italian – Last year I did only 3 screencasts, but Italian people don’t like reading in English, so I should try harder and helping them.
  • Technology/Work Resolutions:
    • JavaScript/jQuery/CSS – I used to be quite good at these when I worked in my first job in a web agency, but since I moved to New Zealand and then to Avanade I’m not doing any real web development any more. I’d love to work more in the client side of web site
    • HTML5 – Find the time to experiment with HTML5 and all its new API and elements.
    • Work on public B2C web sites – This doesn’t really depend on me, but more on the kind of projects my company finds on the market,  but I’d love to work on a project where the problems of the client side (good javascript, client side optimization, performances) are as important as the backend ones.
    • NHibernate – I used it 2 year and half ago, but then I stopped using it when I moved to Avanade. In my latest project I started to use it again, and in the next year I’d love to get deeper into it.
    • Be an agent of change in my team – I’m a strong believer of quality vs the “do it quickly” approach, of agile methodologies and “craftsmanship”. I’d like to introduce this way of thinking into my team as well.

Is this too much for just one year? I guess it’s not. We’ll see at the beginning of April when I’ll do my first update on how my plans for 2010 are going.

[Ilanaaq, the inukshuk by Tim on Flickr]