2010 is here, now what?

With it being the new year, I feel compelled to do one of those predictions or new-year-resolutions posts. I'm not big on either so here's a bit about where I've been and where I'm going.

2009 saw me take a job with Canonical. I started working on the bugs app in Launchpad in April and have since been promoted to team lead for the bugs app team. It's been an amazing few months. Working for Canonical has been a wonderful experience for me. I went from working in companies as the lone telecommuter to a company filled with remote workers. It's wonderful and in the process I've learned a lot about being an effective telecommuter and managing a team remotely. I'll probably put these thoughts into a post sometime in the next couple months.

I'm also working with Zope more these days than Django. From 2005 until 2009, I was doing Django development heavily. There are days I miss Django, but I dip my hand in where I can, mostly with code that runs this site and a couple little toy projects I occasionally hack on. Launchpad is a Zope application, so since April, I've really tried to learn Zope as well as I can. I'm surrounded by great Zope developers on Launchpad, so like working with the Samba team, learning is made easier by absorbing from colleagues. I do like Zope, which may seem weird for a Django guy to say. I'm not a framework zealot, though, and I think Launchpad is a unique Zope app, so I should say, I like Launchpad's use of Zope. I need to do a simple Zope app at some point to get that perspective.

(I still don't love zcml, I have to be honest. The template language is growing on me, and I see it's power. Zope component architecture has won me over completely, though.)

Personally, I feel quite happy about where I'm at with balancing work and life as 2010 begins. I'm as productive as I ever been as both a manager and a coder, and I still have plenty of time with my kids and wife. Some of this is due to time shifting my day to better match European colleagues, but some of it is due to Canonical's focus on project management and communication in a distributed environment, which help to make work time very productive.

Some of my pet projects and hobbies languished a bit in 2009. Anytime you take a new job, this is to be expected. I didn't get the number of books read that I would have liked. I also didn't spend much time in world in Second Life, due to older hardware issues making the experience not so nice. So I want to read more and spend more time in world in Second Life. Discipline will help with the first, and the new laptop I got at Christmas will help with the second. I want to do some personal hacking a bit more, which is what I've always used Second Life for, honestly -- a bit of in world scripting to work on 3D math and similar concepts, viewer hacking to work on my C/C++ skills. I'm planning to work on being disciplined in releasing more of my personal, social-site hacking stuff, too, which is all Python and Django. I've swallowed the lean kool-aid, and I'm on a war against leaving work in progress. In everything personal and professional, I'm taking a task and seeing it through to completion before moving on to something new.

I guess that's my new year's resolution, if I have one -- no unfinished work in progress in 2010! With any luck, I won't wait until 2011 to post here again about how that's working out for me.

Link | Posted by deryck on January 10, 2010 | 0 comments