Hi everyone!

First of all I would like to wish everyone a great 2014!

Much like everyone else I usually finish a year/start a new one by reviewing the goals I set last year and establishing new goals (yes I know it’s already mid-january, but the it’s the thought that counts!).

So let’s see last year’s goals:

Re-read some books (Code Complete, Design Patterns):

Well, I didn’t quite make it… I decided to read new books instead, oh well…

HTML5 and Mobile

I did pass Microsoft’s HTML5 exam but contrary to my predictions, I didn’t have the chance to work with HTML5 nor Mobile technologies most of the year, what a shame. I really thought 2013 would be my HTML5 year.

Git

I’ve been using git for all my projects and also at work and, although I don’t understand all of its features, I’m making progress and I hope to see some progress in 2014.

XEO Community

I’ve released XALPI as an open-source project, so we can say that I at least did something!

Blog

This one went better than expected. I was able to write more blog posts than in 2012 and I hope to improve in 2014 as well

And now the (ambitious) goals to 2014

Revisit Object-Oriented Best Practices and Design Patterns 

This one is basically the same as reading some old books again (like Code Complete, Clean Code, etc…). But I think that we (as developers), from time to time, need to go back to basics and re-evaluate what we think we know about OO Practices (because time and experience shapes our skills in a certain direction and sometimes it’s not the best one). This year I expect to do just that and read a lot about ways of creating object oriented systems and how to take advantage of objects.

HTML5 and Web Development

I’m much more of a back-end guy with some “hackish” front-end skills, which I would like to improve. I’ve been doing some experiments with CSS frameworks (namely Bootstrap) and reading about CSS (trying to learn the basics, really) including the usage of tools such as SASS and Compass which I hope to put to good use. I also need to have a deeper understanding of Javascript.

Security

Regarding WebDevelopment, there’s one area that I think that I particularly need to understand more and that is security. I know the basics of SQL Injection and Cross Site Scripting but I strongly believe I need to know much more if I hope to defend my own applications against attacks. Which means I need to know enough about security to hack my own web applications, ironically 🙂

Another Paradigm

I’ve been toying with the ideia of learning a new language like Scala (because it’s JVM based which is close to my usual reality) because I think it will open new horizons (I’ve a friend who took the Coursera course on Scala and he talks wonders about it), but the time constraints may be to large during the year.

Blog

Again, I’ll try to commit to write more in this blog but with so much goals, we’ll see how that goes.

Happy coding in 2014!