Happy New Year!

New Year, New Goals. Or same goals new outlook :).

This year's theme for me is, focus. My primary weakness is unfocused efforts. I start something, get it rolling and then I move to the next thing. So, this is the year I will buckle down and stick with my goals and direction. This will help my other weakness, follow-through. Top that off with procrastination and you have a recipe for failure. Which is my third weakness.

As you can see I have a bunch of things to work on, but it will be a great year.

To take my first step towards my new years resolution, I'm going to get off the fence. I've been on the fence forever about using C++ or C#. Well, I'm sticking with C++ for my primary development language. This is not to say I won't develop in C# if a project comes up that requires it. What this means is, when I develop an application or maybe even web app (witty.sf.net), it will be in C++. With the help of certain frameworks I don't see this being an issue.

I'm going to use and stick with TrollTech's Qt (www.trolltech.com) framework. They have a solid framework to work from, which will help increase productivity and provide the cross-platform capabilities I need. I will continue to work on my own C++ window toolkit, but this will be more of a hobby.

As for personal and career direction, my company will stick with open source. If a company hires me on to do C++ development, then I will of course move over, but my company R6 will remain an open source company. I'm hoping to make that transition from network eng/admin to developer this year, but being realistic I think this will happen a couple of years from now. So, instead of being on the fence of, do I write commercial apps to generate revenue or do I go the open source route, I"m sticking with open source.

Last but not least I'm going back to school. I'm looking at Kaplan's BS in software development, so that should be interesting. I realize I need a degree to be taken seriously in the software development industry. This will also help reinforce self-taught knowledge I've gained over the last decade.

Well that's it for now.