Introspective, Personal

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

I’ve been bad about updating the past couple of months, I should have some interesting stories for next year though.

It’s been a pretty amazing year. I got engaged, bought a house, wrote a couple of new web apps, learned a lot about Tcl and JavaScript, visited Northern California (and then got stranded in Phoenix on my way back – due to the blizzard going on in Maryland), worked over 180 hours of overtime, and gained a lot of weight (the last one’s not a good thing, but it’ll give me a goal of losing weight for the new year).

I looked up my resolutions for this past year and I think I did ok. Here’s the list:

  • Get good at JavaScript: I feel like I’ve accomplished this one. There’s more for me to know, but I feel like I really know my way around the language.
  • Learn jQuery: Didn’t even look at it this year. There are a lot of cool JavaScript frameworks out there though. I’ll probably get around to learning jQuery at some point, but I don’t think knowing it is as important as I used to.
  • Develop More Web Apps: The Typing Speed Test, the HTML Canvas game, the Blog Stylometry Tool, and lots of updates to the Keyboard Layout Analyzer. I was sort of quiet near the end of the year, but I expect for things to pick up again here soon.
  • Read At Least 4 Programming Books: Learning Dojo, Learning ExtJS, JavaScript: The Good Parts, and Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. JavaScript: The Good Parts and Learning ExtJS were the best of that group, and after thinking more about it, probably the only two I’d recommend from the list.
  • Join A Programming Community: I did not do this, unless you count my subscription to the Programming Sub-Reddit at reddit.com. I’ll give myself half credit here.
  • Write A WordPress Plug-In: I had a couple of ideas, but I lost interest.
  • Release Some Programming Examples: I still want to do this.

So I achieved 3.5 of my 7. Not too shabby, I feel like I accomplished what was important to me, and that’s probably better than meeting the goals I think up at the beginning of the year.

This probably wont be my last post of the year (I’ve got a book review coming), but I hope everyone out there has a great holiday and a happy new year!