Professional Goals for 2009

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?

Comments

[Benjamin Stein]

Not a bad list! It's full, yet certainly do-able. How are you going to keep track of your progress?

[Paul Dix]

I was just going to keep a list and put a check next to each one as I get it done. Of course, some of these will actually translate into blog posts which will help document my process in addition to helping me get that first item checked off.

A year from now I should be able to do a full wrap up. I like this better than the two other popular end of year blog posts: resolutions or predictions. Accomplishing these things adds more value than correctly guessing which mashup will be popular in '09.

[Hugo]

Nice. I'm thinking also in doing the code katas and, if I have time, learn any functional language (thinking of erlang, scala or haskell).
Well, If Basset is couting I'm using it. My version uses hiererchical classification and I implemented some feature wheighting and feature selection techniques. When I refactor the code and write tests I may rerelease it as gem too.
This lib will be used in my site that is something like Google News but with different functionalities.

Regarding user groups I intend to organize a regional conferece for our user group that started in 2008.
Good luck with your goals!