Last year, I chose 5 goals. How did I manage with these?

Write more (this includes blogging and code)

I definitely wrote more code this year, especially early on in the year when Antony and I started Pair With Us. I feel that my blogging is probably around the same amount as previous years. Ideally I’d like to set a target of at least one blog post a week.

Present at one or more conferences

I presented at (what feels like) hundreds of conferences this year 🙂

Antony and I co-presented at Agile 2009 (Chicago), CITCON (Paris), Agile Development Practices (Orlando) and the SkillsMatter BDD Exchange (London)

We co-presented our tutorial at Oxford University as part of their Agile Methods Masters course

I also presented a keynote session at the Software Tester Forum (Zurich)

Help out with the jNarrate open source project

As part of Pair With Us, Antony and I did a little bit of additional work on JNarrate, although the majority of our work was on Narrative Fixture, which is an extension of JNarrate that wires it into FitNesse.

Further my understanding around NLP

I read a lot of books around NLP and hypnosis in 2009. I also enrolled on a Hypnotherapy and NLP Practitioner diploma. I am still learning loads on this and I am really enjoying it

Have a look at learning LISP

Well, as Meatloaf once said, “Two out of three ain’t bad”. I didn’t have time to work through the SICP course. This will stay on the backlog as I am still quite interested to do this

What else happened?

2009 brought some changes outside of the list.

• In March, Antony and I started Pair With Us, a series of unedited screencasts showing us working on the Narrative Fixture project, including all of the discussions, arguments, back tracking (and lots and lots of fun)

  A number of people have shown an interest in the both our programming style, and our willingness to show all online, including a number of prominent software craftsmen, such as Uncle Bob Martin, Corey Haines and Jason Gorman

• In July, I left ThoughtWorks to start up a new company, RiverGlide, with Antony Marcano. This has been very successful so far and I look forward to telling you more about the exciting developments (as well as some more of the history) in future posts