Earlier in the year I made a list of goals I wanted to accomplish this year and decided to publish my progress periodically here…to produce some sort of accountability. And as usual, seeing Darrell’s update made me realize that it’s been way to long since my last update!

Technical Goals

Read the following books:

Become proficient with the following tools & technologies:

  • ASP.Net MVC – No progress, hopefully in the next few months…
  • NHibernate – Finished! Used NHibernate in my first project a couple of months ago and was blown away by it’s awesomeness!
  • The Castle Stack – Finished! Used Windsor on a recent project and explored ActiveRecord. Believe this is as far as I want to go with Castle this year.
  • Team City – Finished! Set up Team City for several projects in the last few months.
  • Ruby (the basics at a minimum) – Finished (but still learning)! My goal was to just learn the basics, actually taking that a step further and am working on an actual Rails project with a Josh.
  • Powershell – No progress here.

Get involved:

  • Two blog posts per month – I more or less went silent in the last two months and hope to kick myself back into gear over the weekend. Started a series of posts comparing design pattern implementations in Ruby and C#, but only finished the first one (Template pattern). Will be continuing this series very soon. I promise.
  • Two technical presentations for coworkers to push agile methodologies at my current company. – Our company has gone through some changes and I don’t see after hours presentations like this happening in the near future, so I’m gonna scratch this one for now.

Certifications:

  • Upgrade MCPD certification from 2.0 to 3.5 – No progress here.

Personal Goals

Family Time

  • Take 2 one week long trips – We took a trip to Disney World last month (which was a blast!) and are hoping to take another long vacation in the next few months.
  • Take 6 weekend getaways – Way behind on this one, believe we’ve taken one so far this year.
  • By the end of the year, work from home regularly two times per week – This is a tough one with my current job, the ability to do this is completely dependant on the project\client and hasn’t been an option lately.

Belief System

  • Read the Bible completely through – I just finished II Kings so my guess is that put’s me at around 30% complete…and 50% of the year is gone already.

Financial

  • Reduce debt by two-thirds – Surprisingly still on track here, it’s forced us to live paycheck to paycheck but it feels good to see substantial progress being made!
  • Become familiar with some of the ins and outs of day trading, as well as how currency trading works – No longer as interested in stocks at the moment, mostly because almost all of our spare money is going to debt reduction. May pick interest up again next year.

Side Projects

  • Finish the project I’ve been working on for the last year! – Almost done, hope to launch this month!!
  • Start a new venture and grow it to produce $500 per month of automated income by the end of the year. – Still working on a project with Josh, may not turn a profit this year but we’ll see.

Looks like I’m really falling behind in my reading (although I’ve been reading things here and there, they just haven’t been books on my list). Planning to change that in the second half of the year.

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