Yearly Goals

The aim is to, at the least, achieve all these goals. The time allocated is from September 1st 2004 to August 31st 2005.

Update: I've closed my 2004-2005 PiP early and I'm pretty happy with where it is. I'll put a newer one up soon.

Note: This page is actually getting a surprisingly high amount of traffic so I thought I should add some comments and an attribution. The original idea for a Pragmatic Investment Plan comes from Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers, to be specific the very interesting slides from the How To Keep Your Job presentation, if you've never seen them and you work in a technology field then I suggest you spend some quality time with them, they might just save your salary in years to come.

The goals underneath are my own and have nothing to do with the Pragmatic Programmers, who are probably at the stage where their todo lists has such items as "become a being of pure energy." Buy their books, it's worth it.

Broad goals

• Write and publish four technical articles.
• 1. A review of Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion that was posted on slashdot. While this is also under the book review section I spent as much time on this as I would normally spend on an article; it also got read by a fair few people based upon the feedback I received. Slashdot Subversion review.
  2. GLLUG March 2005: While this isn't an article I did get to send requests for speakers, email newsletters and updates to a number of different lists. Also I've got no where better to mention it :).
• Attain two tech industry certificates/training courses.
• 1. Implementing BS7799.
  2. Internal Auditor (BS7799)
• Attend two technical conferences. (Non-speaking)
• 1. The London Perl Workshop
  2. FOSDEM 2005
• Read and review twelve books.
• 1. Pragmatic Project Automation review
  2. RADIUS, O'Reilly Publishing
  3. The Art Of the Start
  4. The Bootstrappers Bible
  5. Developer To Designer
  6. Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion
  7. Painless Project Management with FogBugz
  8. Using SANs and NAS
  9. IP Addressing Fundamentals
  10. • Seven-Second Marketing.
      • Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
  11. • The Tao Of Motivation.
      • Danger - Quicksand - Have A Nice Day.
  12. • Little Red Book of Selling.
      • The Tipping Point.
      • You Need to Be a Little Crazy.
• Enter the security field -- I'm working for a BS7799 certified company (one of about 200 in the UK). I'll class this one as met.
• Become semi-articulate :)

Areas to investigate

• Firewire Clustering -- FireWire brain dump. I've done the research and written up some notes.
• Multipath IO
• Design by contract -- Read the chapter in Object Orientated Software development on this topic. Need to experiement with some implementations and write up.
• Automated hardening -- Investigated Bastille and Tiger.
• MySQL HA -- Experimented with replication in a lab enviroment. Investigated (and was disappointed in) MySQL Cluster.
• Failover Firewalls (OpenBSD CARP)

Development

Write and publish four applications/plugins/components that are down-loaded by at least 50 people each.

• Delicious Link Checker -- Freshmeat Release
• get google pagerank script while cleaning up my logs I noticed this has been downloaded more than 128 times. So it makes the list.
• Findbig Files (Unix) Script. This is another one that's been downloaded more than I expected. A grand total of 117 times since November. And no one's sent any bug reports!
• filepkg.sh: A short script that shows which package owns a file; and works with both dpkg and rpm.

Write a useful CPAN module.

Language of the year: Mono

Cross-platform, staticly typed and a good jump off point for Java or .NET development.

Vanity

• Get www.unixdaemon.net into the first 100 hits for the search term 'Dean' -- unixdaemon.net was result 99 in googles listing at 'Sun Mar 27 02:12:30 BST 2005'.
• Update my site with something worth reading -- 100,000 visitors in three months. I'll take that as a positive vote.

---

Last updated Sun Aug 29 13:37:07 2004