In two weeks I'll be making the transition from full time student to full time worker. Instead of worrying about grades and papers I'll have to get real work done. For the last four years I've set a lot of goals for myself, but I've mainly been focused on the single goal of finishing school. Now that I've accomplished that it's time to figure out what the next steps are. Being that it's the eve of a new year, I thought a good way to start would be to outline exactly what I'd like to accomplish professionally in 2009. So here are some goals in no particular order:
- Write 48 well thought out blog posts (once a week for 48 weeks of the year)
- Write an open source library that at least 2 people/organizations use in production
- Contribute to a popular open source library/project
- Finish a working version of Filterly and use it daily
- Learn a new programming language
- Finish reading this book on machine learning
- Read Learning With Kernels by Schlkopf and Smola
- Be a contributing author to a book or shortcut
- Present at a conference
- Present at a users group
- Help create a site that gets decent traffic (kind of non-specific, I know)
- Attend two conferences
- Attend at least 8 nyc.rb (NYC Ruby) meetings
- Attend at least 6 NY Tech Meetups
- Attend at least 4 Columbia Blue Venture Community events (hard because it conflicts with nyc.rb)
- Attend at least 4 NextNY events
- Do all the Code Katas at least once (any language)
That's all I've come up with so far. I probably won't be able to get everything on the list, but if I get most of the way there I'll be happy. A year may be too long of a development cycle for professional goals. It would be much more agile if I broke these down into two week sprints, but this will do for now. It gives me specific areas to focus my efforts over the next 12 months. What goals do you have for 2009?
