I’m just back from Sweden, where I met several folks from Microsoft and our really good friends and partners at Cornerstone. I really like going to Stockholm as people are really bright and welcoming over there!

Tomorrow I will be flying to participate to Jimmy Nilsson’s “European” Software Architecture Workshop…in South Africa!! I know, I know. I’m truly blessed.

As you may have already noticed, this year is looking really promising for me already, so I decided to break my stupid own rules and write down my New Year’s resolutions while the enthusiasm is still high.

Write more code

Last year I moved full steam into product management, release planning, agile coaching, strategic development, research, coordination and business development. In other words, I’ve been fighting like a lion, aiming at removing obstacles, mitigating risks, dealing with constraints, creating new ideas and pursuing new opportunities.
There is something horribly missing in this busy picture, however. I haven’t written much production code for the best part of the year. So that’s it? Years of hard work refining “the craft” have been totally thrown out of the window? Guess what, I’m not prepared to let go of it.
In my humble opinion, C# 3.0 absolutely rocks. I spent Christmas playing with Moq and parsing expression trees for a toy(ish) Linq provider I developed! If you just think that all of this is sad, leave this blog now…there won’t be anything for you to see here 🙂

Therefore this year
Write tons of code. Production code. Learn, share, help and lead by example. As usual, strive for elegance and simplicity. Be humble, it will be easier to improve.

Simplify

But I also want to help people writing more meaningful code. We like to estimate, quantify, measure lines of code, complexity, coverage, we start the stopwatch, we really want to be faster. Some metrics are incredibly helpful; others are not that beneficial.
If there is one thing that I learned while working in the software development industry all these years however, is that we are so distracted by the details of the solutions that we offer, that we often fail to see that we end up trying to solve wrong problems in the first place.

Therefore this year
Strive for elegant simplicity, being more creative than ever… Simple solutions are often incredibly hard to find and may not be there at all. But do not to give up too quickly. Challenge the requirement definitions, as actual needs are almost invariably poorly understood and defined.

Be Focused

I want to be less reactive than I have been in past year. At times, I have been a slave of Outlook for the best part of my day. It is part of my evolving role, I guess. I tried lots of techniques and addins to cope with the ever increasing amount of emails and tasks that clutter my existence…I know, it is only an excuse.

Therefore this year
Stay alert and curious, but don’t get distracted easily. Be less committed and just involved, or simply let go of things that are not that important.

And finally…

Contribute!

I constantly learn things, from everything and everyone, but I sometimes feel that I’m not able to give much in return.

Therefore this year
Contribute more actively to the development community. Work on some meaningful open-source project, speak and write more often.

Happy 2008!