Background
Hope every one had a wonderful new year celebrations on the 31 December night and welcomed the year 2011 with both hands. Here is an attempt from my side to look back at the year gone by and look at the positives. As always there were few up and down during the year. I would like to highlight the positives.
How the year went
First couple of months went in getting settled into the new house in Bangalore as I had moved into it on the 25th of December 2009. On the professional front things were at the peak time as we were getting ready for a major release of our systems into a new country. I had made a new year resolution of getting more involved with the technical community and contributing more by means of blogging as well as being involved with user groups. I managed to do reasonably well. I managed to write 52 blog entries for the year. Although some of them were pure copy and paste of links, the others which I wrote for sharing information purpose gave me a lot of satisfaction.
The feedback has been good from friends and ex-colleagues and people who have visited my blogs. That’s an encouraging sign and a motivation for me to improve upon. I think I improved my technical skills in many ways in last year. Getting better at design concepts helped me in day to day work. The time I spent learning some of the basic stuff related to Entity Framework was really helpful which resulted in the Entity Framework learning series.
In my opinion here is a list of top 5 blogs during the year
- Unit test application configuration
- Unit test background worker
- Entity Framework learning series – the whole series was a learning curve for me so I can’t point out to a single entry in that
.
- Clean code using Resharper and StyleCop – I pay a lot of attention to the quality of the code and I always try to improve the quality by every means possible. Hope developers would have benefited with the posts that I wrote related to things like code metrics etc.
- Improve code quality using visual studio code metrics.
My learning of Agile processes and practices continued to improve as the year went by. It was very satisfying to get promoted in the job towards the end of first half. Although I believe that the promotion was delayed by at least few month it was worth waiting for it. The amount of learning and the quality of that can be compromised with a slight delay in getting promoted
One of the key lessons I learnt during that time was that if you can’t change the system you need to change yourself. When certain things did not go the way I expected I had to take the decision to move out of my comfort zone and do some hard thinking about my professional life. That’s what resulted in me accepting a position as a consultant and relocate to Singapore. It wasn’t an easy decision to make and I have already blogged about it here. I embarked on my new journey and have started a new phase of my life in Singapore from 19th of December. I am really hopeful that this would be another next big thing in my life which can help me move ahead.
At the start of the year or even towards the mid of 2010 I had no thoughts about relocating out of India. But things happened so fast that within 2-3 months everything was finalized. Even at the start of October I did not have anything in mind. All of a sudden I got a call and things were over within 2 weeks time. Life can be so funny at times.
Conclusion
Looking back at the year 2010 I must admit that it was one of the best years of my life. There were lot of positives and I hope it will continue to be same in the coming years as well. On the technical side there are many more exciting and interesting things to learn. Readers of this blog can expect stuff related to Silverlight and NHibernate very soon as I’ll be working on them in my new project. I am tempted to do a NHibenrate learning series similar to the one I did with Entity Framework.
Agile has always been close to my heart and hopefully I’ll get opportunities to share my thoughts about the same. While concentrating on technical and professional life I also hope to spend little bit of more time with my family especially the little one. I don’t want to get into a situation where I realize that my little daughter has grown up and I haven’t spent enough time with her. Time for a really good work life balance (if there exists one in the life of a software engineer)
Wish everyone a very Happy and a prosperous new year 2011.
Until next time Happy Programming
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