It is that time again. The year is nearly done and its time to look back and reap the rewards of the past year. In tip #7 I asked

What timeless core skills do you have and which ones will be your goals for next year?

You need to honestly and openly review your past year’s accomplishments, milestones and lessons. You might even partner with a peer and swap lists to see if there is something you missed.

Yearly Review Questions/Topics:

1. Look at your to do lists - What projects/tasks stand out? Is there a trend?
2. What new skills have you mastered? Don’t be stingy with yourself. These skills could be anything from a new language or technique to soft skills such as presentation or speaking.
3. Project schedules and estimates. Did you do a project on time? Early? Late? If late what did you learn that would help in the future?
4. Did a project a that you did save the company/customer time and money?
5. Did you go above and beyond to help a coworker complete a major project?
6. Did you make a big mistake? What did you do to correct it? What lessons did you take from it? Did it lead to a new process that could be implemented departmental or company wide?
7. Did you find information that helped the company that wouldn’t have been found in day to day business?
8. What skills do you feel you are weakest in?
9. What skills would help you to do your job or excel at it?
10. Don’t forget the small apps that might not have taken long to do, but helped someone else do their job more effectively.

These questions (and others) will help you evaluate your past year and lead you to the bigger questions of where to go next and if not next then help you when it comes time for corporate reviews and raises. Your boss will love that you are prepared and taking initiative. It will help you showcase what you have accomplished and help you plan the upcoming year.

Technorati Tags: Development, Career, Success, Planning, Yearly Review, Questions, Developer

The week before Xmas is crazy two kids birthdays, cookie swaps, cards, and gift wrapping its all very mind boggling.

But take a look at techmeme today and see how the tech world got busy today.

There has been some resurfacing of the importance of backing up and version control. Jeff over at Coding Horror makes a valid point of versioning your database with your application. Robert Scoble points to a friend who had Vista Beta lock him out of his PC. Not to mention the countless number of people who have lost data due to viruses.

This is all just a reminder that as developers and Sys Admins that we should be backing up and versioning as much as we can and what is important to us. Your databases and applications; configuration files and registries before you try a new piece of software, scripts, even your to do lists and resume. I recently had to go back to an old to do list to see what I had done.

My strategy is if it is important it goes onto a back up and gets rotated off site. If I need to keep track of something and may need to roll back or compare/see an older version then it goes under version control and the repository gets put on a back up tape.

Things that I like to backup: Nightly backup of documents, databases, calendars and address books, email files, and version control repositories.

Things that I use version control for: any development (documents, scripts, images for applications, application database structure and data, source code, resumes, to do lists, configuration files and registry hives, and user databases.) I sometimes also keep documents that a team works on. This way all have access to it and can refer back to originals. Its also a nice way to see how things emerged.

Technorati Tags: backup, strategy, version control, development, successful

Rajesh Setty talks about blogging and making content timeless. In context, he refers to making your content be able to stand up on its own long after you have written. It doesn’t expire because it is no longer current news.

You can and should take this one step further to refer to your career. What skills can you acquire that will be timeless? These are the skills that will benefit you the greatest in the long run.

Some examples are writing, presentational skills (speaking, written, and visual aids), user requirement analysis, software architecture, and networking.

What timeless core skills do you have and which ones will be your goals for next year?

Technorati Tags: Career, Development, Core Skills, Timeless Skills, Networking, Audience

The web has come a long ways in terms of usefulness. The interfaces are much easier and nicer. It is easier to search and share information. But has it become too easy and too mainstream?

The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge. Robert Scoble

Robert’s comment strikes a chord that I have felt for awhile now. When a medium is opened to the public and becomes mainstream, it starts to loose its effectiveness and perhaps its authority. Look at the history of the Internet. BBS, newsgroups, forums, live chat, social networking, and social bookmarking. When it was a limited group, it had some use. As it grew the voice of the masses’ was heard and it became more useful. It then became popular and mainstream. All of these mediums suffered similar histories. When they became popular and mainstream the noise grew to deafening volumes and blocked out the knowledge.

It is easy to comment and do a straight mind dump or stream of thought. No filtering needed. Who is going to know who you are. Better yet, look at myspace, et al., most don’t understand or care that their lives are an open book for those who know how to look. If you don’t care that other’s know your personal details, why would you care that they find out that you trashed talked about something you knew nothing about? We are or are becoming an open society that hides behind fake annonynimity of digital life. There is no accountability and when you can sign up for a yahoo or other anonymous email account, there isn’t likely to be any anytime soon.

It isn’t as much fallen from grace as it has gone the way of most mass media and popular Internet services.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, social networks, social bookmarking, Digg, MySpace, Responsibility, accountability, audience