2005 Redux

In 2005 I think I met my Pragmatic-Programmer-inspired goal to learn a variety of programming languages e.g.,

• Developed a small application in Mac OS X's Cocoa Environment (with the help of Aaron Hillegass's book)
  
• Attended a course about Microsoft's .NET Framework and C# (also messed around with Mono)
• Accepted a new contract and learned a few thing about JSF and Spring.
• Began developing a small web application with Ruby on Rails
• Took glancing looks at Tapestry, Smalltalk, Applescript, EJB3, etc.

One thread that seemed to permeate many of these technologies was object-relational-mapping. There's EJB3 and Hibernate for Java, ActiveRecord for Ruby, Core Data for Cocoa, and even LINQ for C#. While the implementations all vary, the basic principles apply to all. It seems like all that time I spent with TopLink in 2001 was well spent because ORM has become the norm.

It also looks like dynamic languages are becoming more popular. I'm glad I spent some time looking at Objective-C before getting on the Ruby bandwagon. A mature framework like Cocoa helped me appreciate the power of a dynamic language. Rails will undoubtedly continue to occupy me for at least a little while in 2006.

But not everything I did in 2005 was related to programming. I also spent some time with:

• A family trip to Maui
• Video Editing
• Looking into my family history
• Playing foosball
• Digital Photography

Travelling has always been something I've enjoyed doing since I met my wife. But when we had kids our amount of travel significantly declined. But now that they're getting old enough, it's nice to be getting back into it. In 2004 we made it to Disneyland, last year it was Maui. Who knows what 2006 will bring...

At the end of 2005 I finally burned a custom DVD. I made a slideshow out of the pictures I took at Christmas, added some videos I edited a few years ago and put them all together with some music and some fancy menus. With the exception of GarageBand and some help from Final Cut Express, I used all the other pieces of iLife for my grand DVD opus.

There's only one thing I wish I'd done more of in 2005, and that's art. I suppose the video/editing/photography thing could be considered somewhat artistic but I'm talking traditional oil-on-canvas kind of art. My son recently complimented me on a painting I'd made a few years ago. Maybe that'll inspire me to finally break out the paints... Here's looking forward to the new year. :-)