Another year has (almost) passed. It was a very exiting year, in which I threw a lot against the wall to see what would stick. I also managed to implement most of my 2012 goals, although, in hindsight, they were a little too vague.
2012
Lets go over the goals and plans mentioned in my last review post:
- eLance: I’ve grown extremely tired of the way things work on this type of outsourcing sites. While I will keep helping out my existing customers, I don’t plan on picking up any new ones.
- Java, for me, is a language very quickly moving towards “COBOL status”. Development in Java is slow with an incredible amount of overhead. For no good reason. I did pick up Groovy this year and I’m loving it. While it’s not perfect, I feel it’s a good compromise.
- After some more PHP work, I realized it’s just not for me. The language is a mix of ideas, seemingly randomly thrown together. No matter what I try, I can’t really get used to it. Furthermore, due to the sheer number of PHP developers available, the job market itself is such a mess, where the lowest bidder wins, but you eventually end up cleaning up after him.
- JavaScript was the real eye-opener for me this year. Although I haven’t written too much about it, I’ve done a lot of Node.JS development last year and I still like it. Yes, you need to properly manage callbacks so they don’t turn your code into a mess. But the system works. Node.JS development forces you to think about issues that other languages try to hide (and they really shouldn’t).
- I’ve continued, with mixed success, to market some of my websites. More on that in my 2013 goals.
2013
So what’s in store for 2013? In all honesty, I’m not sure because I have no idea how much time I’ll have for development work.
In any case, I want to work on just a few, but larger projects. Here’s what I’d like to do:
- Jump into the “Big Data” waters. I’ve previously worked with SOLR, but that was just the start.
- Increase revenue for my Vaadin application. I only plan to do major development if and when I hit my revenue goals. If I do, I’d love to move the entire app to a more modern language (Gradle instead of Maven, Groovy instead of Java)
- Improve my Android app and possibly build another one. I have a big idea-file waiting for me, so I will first need to prioritize.
- Ideally, I want to do at least one major Node.JS project, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fit that into my schedule.
Enjoy the new year.