I spent about an hour last night reading through Francesco Cirillo’s e-book The Pomodoro Technique. Up until this point I knew the basics of the technique, but I really wanted to drill down and get the details. I won’t explain those here - visit http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ to get the lowdown. What I want to talk about is my experience applying the technique this morning.
I managed to complete two Pomodoros. Each of the Pomodoros was filled with internal interruptions of various kinds.
I’m currently making my second trip through Jared Richardson’s excellent book Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. In the “Public Speaking” chapter, one of the recommended avenues for public speaking practice is Toastmasters. I first heard of Toastmasters…you guessed it, on my first trip through the book. Shortly after returning home from NFJS St. Louis, I decided to see if I could find a local club. Lo and behold, a Toastmasters club already meets on the St.
So I’m in the midst of planning my next toy project, specifically with an aim to build something for the cloud, be it Google App Engine, Mor.ph, EC2, etc. (that part is still up for grabs). What I’d like to do is an opt-in blog aggregation site focused around functional programming. It would be very similar to what Glen Smith has done with groovyblogs.org. Groovyblogs is currently my number one referral site and is generating about 20% of the traffic for this blog.
A few days ago I pontificated on my need to choose a new “Language of the Year.” Right now I’m attempting to choose between Scala and Clojure. If nothing else, I’ve learned from this exercise that asking the community for feedback is a GOOD thing. Your comments have been very helpful.
To summarize:
As far as the polls go, Scala is in the lead by a margin of 4 to 2.
In 2007 I established several professional development goals (and later reported my progress on these), one of which was to learn Groovy and Grails. This goal stemmed from the continually referenced idea from The Pragmatic Programmer to “learn a new language every year.” This idea has become so ubiquitous that it even has it’s own four-letter acronym, LOTY (Language of the Year).
Since establishing and reporting on these goals, I’ve had several things get in the way of fully realizing all of them.
Back in July I posted my professional development goals for the year (My performance review is annually in July, so it’s a good time to set goals.), and it seemed like a good idea to take a look at my progress while doing the “New Year’s Resolution” thing.
Learn Groovy and Grails Andy and Dave suggest learning a new language every year, so this seemed like a good goal for me.