I haven’t really mentioned my programming goals for 2006 yet, so here they are:
1. Learn Ruby on Rails (and rewrite Blank Slate with it).
2. Learn Ajax. I know Ruby on Rails gives it to you “for free,” and that’ll be quite nice, but I’d like to know how to do it myself as well.
3. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa. (Specifically, write Beyond. And yes, I’ll have a website up for Beyond pretty soon.)
4. Learn XQuery.
5. Re-learn Perl and get it to stick. (I’m in a text processing class and we do cover Perl — at least the text processing side of it — so that should help.)
6. Re-learn XSLT and schemas. I use XML every day at work, but I haven’t done much with XSLT lately (long enough that I’ve forgotten some of the syntax).
7. Master SQL. I use it every day at work as well and have got a pretty good handle on it, but it’d be nice to learn how to write stored procedures and get better acquainted with the whole gamut of available functions.
8. Master CSS. I’ve got a good working knowledge of the main features, but there’s a lot of extended stuff (positioning, z-indexes, etc.) that I rarely use.
9. Become a better programmer. This is a vague goal because I’m not sure where to begin, other than finding books on good programming practices and reading them and applying them. The Pragmatic Programmer comes to mind as the top book on my coding to-read list.
10. Ending with just nine wouldn’t be proper, so…um…well…write an app so good that my site will get Slashdotted. :)
So, these are the sort of things you can expect to see mentioned here. I’ll also be writing about software design and usability. And lots more. Stay tuned till next time. :)
[tags]Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Objective-C, Cocoa, Ajax, XQuery, Perl, XSLT, XML Schema, SQL, CSS, Slashdot[/tags]