the corner office : tech blog

I started writing this over the holiday but it's already approaching the end of Jan. Without further ado, the annual techie review.

Tricky to talk about work. For a few years now I've gotten my jollies from the buzzwordy stuff - concurrency, low latency, distributed systems etc etc and this year I got about as far down that road as I'd ever imagined I'd go. Dream job, techie heaven, and doing stuff very few people get to do.

And so naturally, I started wondering 'what's next?'

What's next was the City, and when an excellent opportunity came up I took it. So now it's more of the same with the added mix of maths and finance and lots of new things to learn. And that's all I have to say about work.

On the home front, my 2010 goals were to avoid Java for hobby coding, and I said I'd give myself time to pick a project to work on.

As it turned out, there *was* no hobby coding this year. The only coding I did do was for a university project. Aaaand I ended up doing it in Java because I genuinely didn't have time to faff about with anything else. I did a bit of Python and C++ fiddling in the early stages of the project and used R for the maths bits, which turned out to be quite fun. Nothing heavy though.

The next year? Final year of this course, so it's going to be more of the same, although hopefully less pressured. I have no huge goals but plenty of small jobs and tasks I want to take care of.

I'll list some of them to keep me honest:

• do some long outstanding work on the blog app

• a small app in C# to become comfortable enough to whip up small GUIs.

• if I keep playing EVE Online (mainly just trading at the moment), then build something to maximise potential trading profit.

• find something to code up in C++ so I don't become entirely rusty.

... and I'll try to blog as much about it as possible to stay focused.

That looks achievable, let's see how the year goes.