This is my blog post. Pretty obvious, I suppose, but I had to start somewhere. This blog will serve a dual purpose. Firstly to allow me to share ideas, problems and coding solutions within .NET and SQL Server programming and secondly to allow me to share miscellaneous thoughts on other aspects of my life.
The idea to start this blog was instilled to me during my SQLBits conference in London this past weekend. According to a couple of senior executives from the Microsoft SQL team, it is incredibly easy to make commitments in the future but always hard to commit in the present. Personally, I think that commitments are easy, especially if they have to do with something you enjoy. On the other hand, committing to something that resides outside your comfort zone is something that most people avoid as it is hard and require consistency.
The challenge in this case is not about committing to start a blog, though this is a nice first step towards the right direction. The challenge is to set a career target in the next 12 months and work hard to make this target a reality.
It may sound easy, but you have to make it realistic. Smaller realistic goals that help you achieve a greater goal are a great way to ensure that you don't get sidetracked. As a developer with DBA responsibilities, there are a lot of options out there and sometimes this can become overwhelming. Do I want to be a better developer? Do I want to be a better DBA? Do I want to be a better developer that understands how to efficiently interact with an RDBMS system? I suppose the answer to all of the above is yes.
(Unfortunately)? this also means that the scope of personal development is quite big. To narrow the scope down, I decided to do some research and reading. Following from my chat with the brilliant people from Microsoft, the plan is to read 12 books in 12 months. Sound easy, right? It would have been easy if I were still 23 without a family, work and other extracurricular activities. But the reality is a lot different and I’m not going to use the above as an excuse. The 12 books have to be relevant to my job and my personal development so before I supply a list of the books, some further research is required to pick up the right ones. 2 of the books also need to be autobiographies. I’m planning to use the list of books found here. There are also some blogs from fellow developers that embarked on the exact same challenge and they have some decent recommendations.
At the end of each month, I will be using the blog to report on each book as this will re-enforce my commitment to reading the books thoroughly and not just skim over them.
Stay tuned for updates..
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