Resolutions

I have done a lot of thinking the past few days and decided I wanted to share a few New Year Resolutions.

1. Make blogging a priority. I have so many ideas that pop into my head, but I never take the time to think them through and write them down. I want to actually start doing that because I feel I have a lot to offer to the community.
2. Be more innovative. This past year I let myself fall into a pattern where I always do the same thing when I am coming up with solutions for projects. I need to challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone.
3. Finally learn Spring and Hibernate. Like many people, I am in a situation where I am maintaining current and legacy apps that use some older technologies. This means I am basically making fixes to Struts/EJB apps that used to be the standard. The world has moved on to Spring and Hibernate and I have been too lazy follow suit. That will change this year.
4. Become more active in local user groups. Last year I started to periodically attend the Java and .NET user group meetings in my area. I enjoyed them, but I didn’t actively participate in the meetings and as soon as I got busy with work I stopped going. I’d like to start attending more and get to the point where I could actually present something at a meeting.

I know these may be simple, but I figure if I start small I might be able to be an overachiever this year. I really want to accomplish these because I know these will help me become a much better software engineer.