2009 has been a big year. A lot happened. Professionally and in my life in general.
What went well
Reading other books than technical books
I have been reading a lot of books that had nothing to do with the technical aspect of my job, but with other challenges in mind. I’ve read about business development, learning process, design (not software design) and project management. I’ve also came in contact with the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book which gave me a lot of great tools to learn more effectively.
Agile
I’ve been working with an Agile Team for half a year now, going back where I really belong. I liked the experience and hope we (the team) can get even more benefits from this methodology this year. I’ve also assisted to some of the conferences of the Agile Tour 2009 which was a fantastic event.
Web Development and Javascript
I’ve always been a developer with a little knowledge of web design but no deep knowledge. I’ve always had design supplied to me and been able to hack through it and get thing done. This year, I’ve gone deeply in web design and CSS, so deeply that I now really hate browsers differences :). And I’m now an expert in Javascript, thanks to jQuery. Seriously, I made really big improvement on this side.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization that his. I was expected to increase visitors from the US on a website. I’ve started with no real knowledge on how Google was indexing content. So I geared myself, watched videos and read everything I could for this. It’s not always easy but it was a fun learning experience. One tool worth mentioning is the IIS SEO toolkit. The first analysis with this extensions showed me that I had a lot of problems with missing descriptions, keywords, titles, broken links, etc, on my blog, and it provided a great experience in allowing me to resolve them and understand what I did wrong.
Wedding
I’m now married. Since October 17. What an intense ride it was. And we are now waiting for our first child to be born (due February 2010).
Consulting
I’ve done some consulting work at the beginning of the year and it was really fun. Delivered on time and exactly what they wanted. Great experience. Great customer.
What could have been better
Lack of time to post on my blog and the migration to BlogEngine.
I have missed a lot of opportunity to blog and I intend to get back on track this year. I also migrated my blog from Wordpress to BlogEngine.Net this summer and seen a drop of more than 50% in traffic. I blame myself for my lack of migration strategy.
Technical Reading
I read some technical books in 2009, but not as many as the other years. In fact, aside from Clean Code, CSS Web Design and ASP.NET MVC in action, I had read no other technical book.
A contract
A situation has occurred in which I was unable to deliver a project on time. Some deadline were too thigh and a last minute change (technology switch at the last minute) made the situation goes havoc and the project was abandoned (by me).
Skullcandy headphones
I had a pair of Skullcandy headphones that broke unexpectedly. But due to the formidable warranty (complete replacement or half-price on another pair), I had sent them to be replaced in October. I’m still waiting and all my attempt to contact them has failed. The problem is that I would have been able to repair them myself and now I’ve just lost them.
Update 1 (January 14, 2010 : It seems the package never arrived…).
Update 2 (January 19, 2010 : Now they found it and the new headphones are being returned to me.
Update 3 (February 11, 2010) : 3 weeks now and still haven’t received them (Canada Post is slow or …).