Happy New Year to everybody! 2008 is going to be an exciting year for me and my family. All we’ve got to worry about is a little cross country move.
The biggest change for me professionally is that I’m leaving consulting to lead a new development team for a small ISV in Austin. I’m basically getting to build a new team and product from scratch to replace their current product line written in COBOL with .Net 3.5. The technical solution is almost entirely greenfield, and the team and I have complete say in how we’re going to conduct the work in terms of process and practices. We’re even gonna have a real life tester and customer proxy in the office. It’s exactly the opportunity that I’ve wanted for quite sometime.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but it wears on me to have to make so many compromises due to organizational politics or apathy or just general stupidity. All I really want is to be put in a situation where I have the power and responsibility to make projects succeed. The only thing keeping me from succeeding in the new year is the limits of my own ability. I want to work in a shop and team that has the will to be good. More on this later.
Other stuff
- Since wrapping up my last consulting engagement I’ve been able to sink some real time into expanding my skillset and catching up on stuff I’ve watched go by. I’ve spent a lot of time on planning and estimating to get ready to do iteration management in my new position. I’m trying to incorporate more BDD flavor in my development efforts. Development wise, my New Year’s resolution is to write more expressive specifications. I’m finally giving DDD a longer look — but I still think it has a high jargon to usefulness ratio and leads to some overdesign. The next thing for me is incorporating some Ruby tooling like Rake and ActiveRecord migrations for our new build environment.
- I’m working on a StructureMap 2.5 release to make it easier to use for newbies and give it more dynamic abilities for advanced users. Coming back to StructureMap is like an exercise to find out how much I’ve grown as a developer since the last release.
- Bellware and I are kicking around some ideas to incorporate executable requirements in plain text into StoryTeller like this.
- I’m going to try to write articles for actual journals. My first “real” article since the ASPToday days gets published next month.
- Assuming I get going and finish up the proposal, I am writing a book around the Build your own CAB series on design patterns for building desktop clients. I’ll be basically blogging the draft here about the same way Ayende is doing with his DSL work.
- I received my MVP award for 2008 this morning. I’ll use it as motivation to write something useful here soon. I think I’ll be at the MVP summit in April and I’ll definitely be at the ALT.NET event immediately following.
- I’m undecided about trying to speak at many conferences next year, but I’m perfectly happy to go anywhere in Texas or close by for events if anybody wants a speaker.
- I’m definitely looking forward to getting back to AgileATX and other developer communities in Austin.
- After 9 months of no gym because of my work and family schedule, my goal is to be able to be able to run with kids a decade younger on the basketball court about the time that the bluebonnets start blooming.
Now, back to watching the Cotton Bowl. Missouri playing in a New Year’s Day bowl game. I’ve seen everything now. There’s just something right about Pat Summerall doing the play by play, too bad Keith Jackson is retired for the Rose Bowl.
