Pragmatic investment plan 2011-2012 : The update

Warning: This blogpost has been posted over two years ago. That is a long time in development-world! The story here may not be relevant, complete or secure. Code might not be complete or obsoleted, and even my current vision might have (completely) changed on the subject. So please do read further, but use it with caution.
Posted on 02 Feb 2012
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A little bit less than one year ago (actually, 9 months ago), I’ve created a blogpost about creating a Pragmatic Investment Plan. Even though the year is not finished for me yet, I still like to share my experiences with such a plan and what actually has come from it.

First off, I must confess that the plan didn’t play a very big role in the last year. As always, things won’t work out the way you think they would, and last year wasn’t any different. First of all, I’ve started freelancing which I may or may pursue for the next year. There are other (personal) reasons on whether or not continue, so I’m can’t say I will be in the same situation next year. However, I will try to make the new ‘12-‘13 plan to be more of a guideline for the coming year.

Nevertheless, looking back at the plan, a lot of it has been achieved, even though some not quite as I planned. Let’s go over the list:

Broad Goals

Certify for LPI 301 - and at least 2 (30x) specialties.
Status: did not succeed.
Reason: I’ve actually scheduled these exams and had to reschedule three times before I decided to cancel them. There wasn’t enough time for me to actually do some studying (since I don’t know everything (yet) there is to know about LDAP).

Certify for MySQL Clustering.
Status: did not succeed.
Reason: Again, I’ve scheduled this together with the LPI-301. But afterwards found out that the exam materials (the book itself) isn’t available anymore. I find it strange that the exam itself is still given, but after looking at the syllabus, I’ve decided I would drop this exam on the grounds that it’s worthless. **

Trying NOT to be part of everything (hard to do).
Status: did not succeed.
Reason: There are many nice things, and I like them all. Writing a patch here, submitting a pull request there. Writing program A, B AND C at the same time.. It’s horrible! I really need to focus less projects.

Getting more articles published.
Status: success!
Reason: More articles have been published in PHP|architect magazine. And once in a while, when I feel up to it, and they want some articles, I’m happy to write an article about - something.

Finding out if ANYONE is interested in co-writing a book about Operating Systems programming.
Status: success!
Outcome: nobody is interested :-). However, writing a book is something that is currently in progress, and I’ll probably can tell you a bit more about it very soon… (secretsesss)**

Writing more blog posts on CybOS. Status: did not succeed
Reason: I haven’t spend much time on CybOS, but I’ve managed to finish up enough to place it online on github. So it’s out there for everybody to take a look at the internals of an OS. However, more stuff should be written about it.

Attend FOSDEM 12
Status: will not succeed
Reason: personal plans interfere for me to come over.

Attend Confoo 12 (as a speaker preferably)
Status: did not succeed
Reason: I blame Anna Fillina for this (no, just joking). However, seeing the schedule makes me even more sad I won’t be attending. But there is always hope for next year.

Attend Tek12 (as a speaker preferably) Status: will succeed
Reason: I’ve been selected as a speaker and will be talking about three very neat subjects.

Attend Loadays 12 Status: no clue
Reason: It might interfere with another conference.

If I read books, at least review them on my blog. Status: success!
Reason: On occasion I do read some (marvelous) books. So I’ve tried to do some blogging about it. Truth be told that I don’t really know much about reviewing books, and most of the time it’s not a long post about the actual book. Somehow, reviewing books isn’t my forte so I’m not sure if more will follow.. sorry :)

Read up on the following (new) techniques

Read up, and do more work on some interesting Apache TLP projects like:
Apache Couchdb - very done.
Apache Hadoop - done.
Apache Mahout - haven’t done, except for some basic reading up and fiddling around with it.

Areas to investigate

Write more blog posts about different subjects in both development and system administration.
Status: Meh
Reason: I think I could make more time blogging about the things I do a bit more..

Find out more about devops in general.
Status: done
Outcome: fascinating stuff and probably the way to go.**

Learn more about puppet. Status: done
Outcome: spend the last year knowing a lot about puppet and being able to teach to others (which is the only way to know for sure you get it as well). Love the system and we WILL see more of this in the coming years in the PHP-scene as well.

Grasp (not only program) the stackbased context switching system. Status: success!
Outcome: I get it know.. And yes.. there should be a blogpost about it…

Knowing git
I’ve read the git internals twice, and so did I with the pro-git book. Last year was actually the first year I’ve started to use git for work, and loving it! I don’t think that A) I like spending time in SVN and B) have anything that is not .git’ed (even my book is currently versioned by git). After reading the internals for the second time, things actually made much more sense than the first time I’ve read it :)

Do more with iSCSI.
Status: did not succeed
Reason: mostly because iSCSI didn’t really crossed my path last year. There was some preliminary stuff I did with vsphere and some SAN setups, but not enough.

Development

 Get newlib compiled and run userapps in CybOS. Status: succes!
Reason: did a few attempts but finally managed to get it running thanks to xomboverlord toolchain

Redesign the Joind.in Android app. Make it a bit more workable, even with the current API.
Status: did not succeed
Reason: not enough time / bugreports.  So apparently it’s still working. I do have heard others where thinking about writing a new one for Lorna’s v2 api.

Redesign EZShopping - Merge all the stuff still in progress. And deploy a 3.0 version.
Status: meh
Reason: still in progress

Do some more work on joind.in itself. I tend to do a lot, and move on to the next interesting project. Stop doing that :)
Status: success
Reason: did (lots more) bug-fixing and features for joind.in, and still find it a nice project to work on. It’s strange, because the codebase - well - isn’t the best one you’ll ever meet, but it’s nice to take your mind of your daily work and just work on these things once in a while. There are times I fix 10 bugs a week, other times I don’t touch it for months. It’s just an on-off project so it seems.

 Get my Arduino to do something useful.
Status: did not succeed
Reason: can’t think of anything.. :/

Language of the year

It was RUBY. Did some work in ruby to try to get the hang of it. I really like the language so I’ll try to do more things in ruby just for the fun of it.. Also, makes it easier to checkout puppet and even see if we can contribute to it..

Vanity

Meet more, and keep in touch with many interesting people.
Status: big success!
Outcome: oh boy. Did I meet interesting people. I don’t even know if I can name them all, so if I forgot you - i’m terribly sorry :)   So hi to Jeroen Keppens - Wim Godden - Matthew Weier O’Phinney - Zeev Suraski - Stephan Hochdoerfer

  • Anna Fillina - Juozas (utf8) Kaziukenas - Rowan Merewood - Sebastian Marek - Dean Wilson - Kris Buytaert - Karanbir Singh - and many many others I’ve talked or got drunk with the last year… You know what the cool thing is this year? I will meet even more!!!