It’s that time of the year to review the progress, and to set the goals for the future. Firstly, I would like to thank all who have (directly or indirectly) helped me learn so much during the past year. It was a fun ride in many ways. In this post I would like to review about three items — this blog, books that I read, and about my Twitter experience.
Blog
I have this blog up for a couple of years but it’s in 2009 I’ve started taking it more seriously. My goal with the blog is straight and simple — share what I learn, and in turn benefit from the collective wisdom of my readers, friends and fellow bloggers. Towards that effect, 2009 is a satisfactory year.
Here are the top posts of the year –
- REST: CRUD with JAX-RS (Jersey) and REST: CRUD with Grails: I did a lot of reading on REST this year. That reading along with discussions with some of the best in the industry helped significantly. Towards that effect, I’ve written two posts on the CRUD aspect — using JAX-RS and Grails (just to clarify, REST is lot more than CRUD but these posts concentrated on performing CRUD operations using two most exciting frameworks, IMO). You can find all my posts related with REST here.
- Open Source Software Model – A Positive Sum Game: Blogged about open source software and about a keynote talk that I attended at Philly ETE conference.
- Subversion: LDAP Integration using Apache: I’ve achieved a good level of proficiency administering Subversion this year. This post discusses about LDAP integration. [Git is next in the list, look forward to work lot more with it in 2010].
- Jira Plugin: Unique Issue ID Across the Projects: Developed a Jira plugin that assigns unique identifier to the issues across the projects. Further, this post extends the functionality and make the IDs search-able.
- Career 2.0: Take control of your life: Write up of an inspiring talk.
Books
Regardless of the vast number of resources that are available online, a book is still my preferred choice. A good book helps in learning something new (or reinforce the concepts) in a systematic and a structured manner. A well-written book may not answer all the questions but helps in generating enough enthusiasm for further exploration.
Here is the list of books that I read in 2009. I could have done bit better on this front, but given all the constraints in place this may not be so bad –
- Groovy in Action: Groovy has become one of my favorite scripting languages. [My review]
- Career 2.0: As the name indicates, a career-oriented book from Pragmatic Bookshelf. [My review]
- Grails in Action: An excellent book on Grails. [My review]
- Hello World: A cool book for Python beginners. [My review]
- The Passionate Programmer: The title says it all, a great read. [My review]
- RESTful Web Services Cookbook: Not released yet, scheduled for the first quarter of 2010. I had great fun reading and reviewing this book. Watch out for it, has got delicious recipes for all REST enthusiasts. [O'reilly link and Safari online]
There are a few more books that I haven’t finished reading yet. I will be writing about them soon.
I’ve resisted so long to sign-up on Twitter. Primary reason for that resistance was I was not sure how that 140-character thing would be transformed into something meaningful. That resistance broke down just over an year ago. 1700 tweets later, I’m here to report how much I learnt via Twitter for the last one year or so.
I use my Twitter account primarily to tweet about software, architecture, programming languages and the stuff related. Feel free to follow me there, if you are into it.
There are quite a few geeks out there, Twitter gives a great chance to peek into their thought process. It’s also a great place to share the links and articles you are reading. I’m also glad that I gained some great friends and met some of my ex-colleagues with whom I lost touch a little while ago.
It is extremely easy to waste the time and not find any use of Twitter based on how you use it. For me, all that matters is to follow the folks who are willing to share their knowledge, and strictly stick to the passion — technical topics. You don’t see any tweets about what I ate for my lunch, etc. Not that anything wrong with it, I just don’t find much value in providing that kind of information.
Conclusion
2009 is an year that I’m reasonably satisfied with some of the milestones that I’ve set out for myself. However, I know there are many more miles to go …
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