What I Create

Along with a lot of other people I know and follow on Twitter one of my resolutions for this year (I’m normally not big on new years resolutions) was to consume less, twitter, blogs, articles and videos, and create more. I spend far too much time on twitter, following interesting links, and well, not so interesting but entertaining links and soon enough I am laughing at a cat with glasses farting unicorns off somewhere in the darkest corners of the Interntet. Enough of that!

I came across a nice quote from Why the lucky stiff in Giles Bowketts excellent blog article from a few days ago

- When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create.

So in order to up my game a bit, I thought I’d blog about what I create and what I intend to create in 2012.

• An ebook for my son

  I described it in more detail in a blog post of it’s own. I am proud of this one, not so much because of the technical merit, but how well it worked. My son is reading like a champ, got praise from his teacher and is moving on the books and Donald Duck magazines. This is also an ongoing effort, as we’re only at book 3 now.

• Conference tutorial

  I have submitted a tutorial suggestion for the 2012 Roots conference on the topic of smoke testing web apps. As of writing the jury is still out on this one, but I hope it gets approved. I have done some work on smoke testing at work these last few weeks and it has already saved our bacon several times.

• Javazone video site

  I am also working on a video site collecting the vimeo videos of the last two years worth of presentation videos from JavaZone and mashing it up with some other data sources. It’s not quite ready for prime time url dropping just yet, but I’ll return to a separate blog post when that happens. I hope it’s received well.

• Acting on suggestions

  I have become more active in suggesting new things to try at work, for improving our workflow and following through, building scripts etc. The smoke testing effort is one example of this, but also trying out some suggestions for process changes. Next step here is to encourage my co-workers to do the same also. That is the harder part in this.

Non-tech

I count actually doing non-tech related stuff also a big part of this. Time is short when the agenda is hogged by kids, but there are two big things planned this spring. First is doing a little house refurnishing and actually building something from scratch, not just mounting Ikea furniture. The second is taking another step in performance on the mountain bike. More hours on the bike seat and working on improving the quality of the training as well. And we’ll see how that plays out in the end of May when the first race is on.

All in all I would definitely say that this plan has improved my focus and I also find it brings more creativity with it. I have never come up with this many ideas of things to try before and also having the energy to try them too, is just great.

I am a happy camper.