I spent two years of my life serving a mission for my church, where I learned to set goals. There are small goals, and bigger goals, all leading up the larger goals. I learned to accomplish the smaller goals to get on to the larger ones. This has been the core of all of my personal growth since then. At the end of each week, I evaluate my week's goals and set goals for the following week. We have a new year now, and so I thought I'd blog about some of the technical goals I've set for this next year.

Data Visualization - Processing and Flex

When I started freelancing in mid-2007, I started to realize there was a world of data that needed to be expressed with better visualizations than just bar and line graphs. This idea stuck with me all of 2008, and in mid-December, I started discussing this with a previous coworker/good friend, and some ideas came to fruition. I spent the last two weeks working with Flex, and eventually Processing (because the Flex development support in Linux is terrible).

This year, I'd like to use these new found skills, along with some other skills still needing development, to start finding ways to display relational data, historic data, etc. in a manner that is new and innovative (of which I have some ideas which will come forth in future blog posts).

Release More Software!

So, one of the things I've learned since starting work at Canonical this past year is the importance of releases. Some examples are Launchpad and Bazaar, both of which have a four week release cycle. This means that, if you're sticking with official releases, you only have to wait, at most, four weeks for a new version.

Specifically to me, Entertainer could benefit from monthly release cycles. We don't have a large team, but with each branch landed, there is significant change in the Entertainer code base. One of my goals this year with regard to Entertainer is to have monthly release cycles for Entertainer (and I've been vocal about this with the other Entertainer developers).

Automate My Home

2008 brought Moriah and I a significant amount of debt, but also a home. We've been quite happy living here so far (if we weren't, it's too late now). In 2009, I'd like to have home automation in every room of this house, for no other reason then that I'm a geek, and this should be a geek's home. There is plenty of potential for home automation, but it'll have to be a gradual one. Good thing I have a year to do it.

Hack!

I love hacking. Seriously. I absolutely love it. I'd like to do more of that. --:)