It was exactly 2 years ago.

I was embarking on the biggest change in my career as a software developer. Coming from about 10 years of development for Motorola, in an embedded environment, almost exclusively based on a closed proprietary OS, almost exclusively in a procedural language (C), I was moving to a modern VM-based environment (.NET),  using an object oriented programming language (C#) always on the move (C# 3.0 had just been released), in a small sized company. I have learned a lot in these past two years in ORS, having the pleasure to work with a bunch of very talented developers, where I could practice being the worst on several occasions.

Now, after two years, it's time for a new journey: I have recently joined Deltatre, a fast growing company in the sport IT business that is behind many big sport web sites (think uefa.com or fifa.com). I will be part of the core infrastructure team, reporting to the chief software architect, helping shaping the engine that delivers match events to a group of diverse client applications.  

Not only is this a very exciting professional opportunity, but luckily enough the office is located at a walking distance from my home (I have literally reduced my commuting time by more than one order of magnitude!). This will leave me more time for my family, and I especially look forward to spending more time with my two kids.

Photo by chiaralily.

The new year has just started and it’s time for me to share my professional life resolutions for the upcoming year.

Through books, articles, blogs, podcasts, one hears about that language, or that technology, or that process which would be great to try and learn. Unfortunately, since the spare time is not infinite, one has to make choices and concentrate on what might give the best return on investment in the short/medium term. The following are the two or three things which I have chosen to dive in this year:

Read the Blue Book

Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans is one of the best book that I have come across on software design in a while. Not always an easy read (some say it’is “dense”), I am going through it slower than usual: every chapter is full of sound advices and deep concepts that take a while to sink in.

Luckily in my current project I will have the opportunity to apply many concepts from this approach. For this reason alone, this makes to the top of my list for 2010.

Learn Ruby

2009 has been for me the year of C#. The Pragmatic Programmer suggests to both to learn a new language every year and getting familiar with one scripting language. Most experts seem to agree that learning a language with a different paradigm from the one you use everyday is a big plus. Martin Fowler (who favors Ruby) states that:

[...] programming languages do affect the way you think about programming, and learning new languages can do a lot to help you think about solving problems in different ways. (It’s important to learn languages that are quite different in order to get the benefit of this. Java and C# are too similar to count.)

I am not expecting to become proficient with Ruby in the near future (after all, I will still be using C# in my every-day at work). However from what I have seen so far it really looks like a great language to learn, so I am looking forward to it.

Play with Subversion

In my previous job at Motorola I was developing in a mixed Unix and Windows environment; Rational Clearcase Multisite was the company-wide version control tool. Clearcase is a real heavy weight, and probably one of the few tools that can handle teams of hundreds of developers located anywhere word-wide.

When I landed my current job I had to switch to the much more limited (and widely hated) Microsoft Source Safe (hey… always better than no version control at all, right?) Luckily, rumors has it that we might soon migrate to Subversion.  Subversion is widely used in the open source community and I guess I’ll need it once I start playing with Ruby and downloading libraries etc…

Other Books to Read

Beside the blue book, there are a few other books that I plan to complete reading this year. I have already started Clean Code and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Next on my list is Working Effectively With Legacy Code and Agile Estimating and Planning. I promised myself not to buy any more book before I clean my current queue!

Stuff Left for 2011

As I mentioned, there are so many other things I would love to investigate and play with, but there is only so much time available, considering that 2010 will bring in .Net4.0 and C#4.0 that will surely be a priority.

Therefore, the following I guess will have to wait till 2011:

• Learning a functional programming language (possibly Haskell or F#)
• Getting familiar Domain Specific Languages (Martin Fowler is preparing a book on the topic)
• Play with Android and/or iPhone development
• The Next Big Thing from 2010!

It’s been a little more than 6 months that I have started blogging and it’s already time to look back and have a small retrospective. All in all, it’s been a lot of fun putting together post after post.

I haven’t got a strict publishing schedule, and I tend to prefer quality over quantity.
That being said, not all posts are created equal and inevitably some received greater attention than others. Here’s a little list of the posts that have ranked higher in my stats.

Visual Studio 2008

Overall, posts related to Visual Studio tend to gather a lot of audience. The post on the shortcuts is ranking number 1 in my statistics. A sign that many developers still prefer to move around using the mouse as little as possible. And so do I.

• Most Useful Visual Studio 2008 Keyboard Shortcuts
• More Visual Studio 2008 Shortcuts: Trasposing Characters, Words and Lines
• Must have VS 2008 Free Plug-ins (1): Style Cop
• Must have VS 2008 Free Plug-ins (2): Ghost-Doc

Design By Contract

During the summer I have started investigating Microsoft’s way to Design By Contract, that is Microsoft Contracts. These introductory articles have received their fair share of visitors.

• Introduction to Microsoft Code Contracts
• Code Contracts: Invariants
• Code Contracts and Inheritance

WCF

Moving files around with WCF seems to be a pretty common task, yet there have been very little posts on this topic on the net. Therefore once I managed to put together a workable solution, I shared my implementation so that others may pick it from there and adjust to taste. As expected, these two posts have become a hit.

• File Transfer with WCF
• File Transfer with WCF: Part II

Service Locator

In one of my projects I have found myself in the need of creating a tiny service locator. I didn’t want to bring in our company’s full fledged IoC container in this case, to keep depenencies to a minimum. This series of post describing that little implementation have been fairly succesful.

• Service Locator Pattern in C#: A Simple Example
• Service Locator Pattern in C# with Lazy Initialization
• A Singleton Service Locator Pattern

Reviews

I am currently reading many technical books at the same time. One of the best of the group has been the The Pragmatic Programmer. Despite being a recent post, this one is already ranking very high, possibly because of the recent surge of interest around the sofware craftsmanship movement.

• Book Review: The Pragmatic Programmer