One year of programming

Tim Sommer -

One year of programming ended, another started.
It's the time of the year when people traditionally take a moment and look back at their achievements in the last year, and I'm going to do the same in this post. So it's mostly for self-reflection, but perhaps it can give you some ideas or inspiration for your own technical ventures next year :).

2015

2015 was a good year! Let's take a look.

I spent a lot of time researching ECMAScript 6. In preparation for the release of Angular 2.0 for one, but also for my future JavaScript ventures and my -new found- interest in TypeScript. I gave a talk about it for my company, if you're interested: slides are available here and code samples can be found here.

Diving into Angular 2 was on my to-achieve list, but since it only just reached the beta stage I haven't given it that much attention.

I wanted to take a deep dive into (web) security but was only able to scratch the surface. It's a pretty advanced topic though, so it will probably become more of a long-term goal :).

Like all years attracting more visitors and -hopefully- more readers to my blog is a priority. I published 10 blog-posts in 2015, I have about 70 unique visitors on an average day with a grand total of 25K visitors last year. Not bad, not bad at all.

I attended a U2U training called 'Patterns and Practices in .NET', given by @peterhimschoot, which was awesome and highly recommended. I learned a lot!

Because I'm using it on a daily basis for my client I spent a lot of time researching NServiceBus last year. Which resulted in me going down the road of CQRS, MicroServices and EventSourcing. Which is pretty awesome and a lot of fun. And hard!

Last year the vast amount of time I traditionally spend researching and building frontend stuff was replaced by backend architecture stuff. And I enjoyed it! Who would have thunk it ;)!
On a side-node though: I did spend huge amounts of time researching Gulp, TypeScript, more Node, VsCode and aspnet vNext.

And then there is Team4Talent, where I am the competence manager, which I love, and am very passionate about, and which takes up a LOT of time. But that's okay :).

2016

I'm going to be a bit more cautious about setting goals in 2016. I am usually one for raising the bar insanely high but it might be fun to take it easy for once :). There will also be a huge change in my personal life in 2016 so a lot of my time will probably go there. More info on that will follow shortly :). But there are some things I'd like to accomplish in 2016:

  • Get started with Angular 2.0. It's bound to be released some day, right ? :)
  • Get hands-on experience with Ember and React.
  • I'm writing a Nodejs architecture in TypeScript which I'd like to see finished.
  • Get better at writing apps with VS Code.
  • I'd love to finish up a working example of CQRS with Event Sourcing I'm writing, but it is really heavy stuff. So we'll see where we'll get.
  • Even more visitors to my blog! I would love to be able to get 100 visitors a day ! :)

Big things, a new start, new goals. It will be an interesting year! I wish you all the best of luck with your own ventures, dreams and goals. May you all have a successful and amazing 2016!