Welcome to the Future!!!

It’s 2010. Seriously. Can you believe it? Aren’t we supposed to have flying cars, hoverboards, and have space ships that can reach Jupiter? I mean, really, we’re way beyond the year 2000 now. As a kid, I remember thinking how awesome it will be to actually get to live in the future. I guess I should be consoled in the fact that TVs are a lot bigger. That’s a plus.

So, with 2009 as a distant and 5 day old memory, I’d like to share my thoughts on how the year went.

Professional Life

FSDNUG has continued to thrive over the past year. I really look forward to the meetings and getting to hang out with everyone. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m taking over as president for 2010. The real test for me will be to see what I will be able to say about the group next year :-)

I continued speaking occasionally at developer events this year, including giving my PowerShell talk the Shreveport, LA DNUG, the Little Rock, AR DNUG and the Conway, AR DNUG as well as at the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp. I’m planning on continuing to practice my speaking skills this year… if I can only pick a topic to talk about! I also gave an open spaces session on Event Driven Architecture at devLink. With all of my presentations this year, I received the INETA Community Champion award!

At work, this past year got me pretty excited because, this year more than any prior year, I get the feeling that more and more people are starting to understand practices like SOLID as well as the purposes behind TDD. We’re also seeing more of a mentorship role starting to occur and, though it is still in its infancy, I think it could really help our developers mature.

Outside of my day job, I got to deploy my first Ruby application, a pretty basic Sinatra application. It gave me the chance to completely step outside of my .NET comfort zone for a little while to just get a taste of what’s possible. I haven’t deployed a Rails app yet, but that’s next on the list. I’m also a huge fan of git now.

Personal Life

Away from the computer, my wife and I took charge of coordinating the LTC (Leadership Training for Christ) activities that our youth group at church works with. To be entirely honest, that role was more intimidating for me than any of my user group presentations had ever been. I feel like I know how to talk to developers. I didn’t really know if I knew how to speak to teenagers. I’m still not sure if I do, but the LTC convention this year was a lot of fun and we’re already ramping up to start for this year.

Looking forward…

I’m planning on increasing my Ruby knowledge even more - I realize now that the best way to do this is to work on something. I’ve already got a project in mind so that’s in the works.

I feel like there is so much out there to learn, and not in a bad way. I love learning something new every day. I just want to do a better job of helping to dispense that knowledge this year!

And by the way, if you happen to know when we’re going to get those flying cars from Back to the Future, my internal 10 year old sure would like to ride in one.