The last year was a big year for me, professionally, highlighted by several things such as working in London, attending the Seattle & London Alt.Net conference and the move back to Perth. The amount I have grown largely from realising that big companies and big cities do not necessarily mean good quality of work... in fact quite the opposite and that after meeting the hard core Alt.Net'ers I realised how much I dint know about fundamentals of coding... I was basically a Microsoft coder (which is not a bad thing but its bad not to know the alternatives). Since moving back to Perth I have managed to pick up a great contract with a very open minded and technically skilled team. Fortunately they are taking on board a lot of the new design and process concepts I have picked up over the last 2-3 years that I have managed to solidify of the last 18 months. Its actually been really good because it has forced me to put my money where my (particularly large) mouth is. With this is have realised that I have something more to give the community than I am perhaps currently giving. With this realisation I am intending on doing more presentations at user group type meetings and have plans for a Back to Basics coding day in which I would like to share with the community the core concepts behind things like TDD, IoC, SOLID, DDD, AOP etc that I think are not being picked up by the masses, especially here in Perth. The locals have excellent understandings of the new cool wizz-bang tech based stuff (like Azure, WPF etc) but without core fundamental programming knowledge and design principles you will still be building a potential house of cards architecture.
I also plan on realising the Artemis West Stack as a guidance package that allows for flexible Data Driven and Domain Driven smart client application that are technology agnostic. This has been months in the making with many revisions and re works (and lots of swearing at the GAT). I do not initially intend for this to be OSS at the moment (AW is not an OS company) however I will chat with the other directors to see what direction this will take.
Last year I took time out to learn two new languages, Ruby and Python as well as a dabble in JQuery. This year I plan on Learning F# and actually putting the Python and Ruby to use... learning a language and not using it is not really any good e.g. I studied French for 5 years but I am conversational at best now due to lack of use.
I also think it may be of benefit to AW for me to get certified. So I will probably do some of the dirty M$ certifications and hopefully a scrum master course if they do one in Perth.
On top of looking for a house to buy, 2009 looks to be another big year :)
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