The plans for 2010

There is an update to this post available here: http://www.kristofclaes.be/blog/2010/06/17/the-plans-for-2010-update/.

In the wonderful world of IT there is an such abundancy of things to do and discover that it is often hard to focus on just a few them. Most of the times, that leads to superficially looking into a lot of things while mastering none of them and before you know it, you’ll be the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none.

Because a new year goes hand in hand with New Year’s resolutions, I thought it might be a good idea to make some resolutions in the area of technologies. I’ve taken some time to compile a list of things I believe are quite interesting and want to know more of. It is my intent to check off items on the list during the year and by the beginning of 2011 I should have finished everything. I have tried to keep the list on the small side to have a buffer for one or two extra things I might encounter during the year. If find too many things, they’ll just have to wait for 2011.

This is the list I mean to finish, in no particular order:

• Get the MCTS 70-536 – Application Development Foundation certificate
• Get the MCTS 70-562 – Microsoft .NET 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development certificate
• Build a demo application in ASP.NET MVC 2
• Build a demo application with MongoDB, CouchDB and/or db4o
• Learn some more about continuous integration

The fun part is that certain items can be combined. Let’s say I build a demo application in ASP.NET MVC 2 and use MongoDB for data storage. That’s two items off the list. Why stop there? Why not use dependency injection and integrate all three databases in the application? And why not set up a continuous integration server while developing the application? I must admit maybe that’s a bit too ambitious.

We’ll see where we get!