At the end of last year I made a blog post entitled New Year’s Resolution? Be A Better Coder. In that post, I detailed three key areas in which to improve. At the end of each month, I have decided that I will give a little status update.

1. Read More
The Idea: There is so much knowledge in both books an online. It would be a bountiful effort to take in some said knowledge.
The Goal: My goal is to read three books this year (one every four months) and subscribe to ten good blogs.
The Progress: Out of all the resolutions, I think this is the one where I am tearing it up. I am a little more than half-way through a book I picked up after The Pragmatic Programmer (See my post on that.) called Agile Development. On the blog front, I have finally set up my Google Reader and I am following five programming blogs (and XKCD, of course). As an aside, I am always looking for recommendations!

2. Learn a New Language
The Idea: Every language is a tool in the toolbox. Learning more tools and maintaining a repertoire of them would be most beneficial.
The Goal: My goal is to learn and implement a few solutions in Python and in Perl.
The Progress: None. I could give you five great excuses why I am too busy, but great excuses only help me to develop my ability to bullshit.

3. Be an Architect
The Idea: Where a programmer applies some duct tape to stop a leak, an architect replaces the corroded pipes with sturdier ones. This is most essential to career advancement, I’d say.
The Goal: My goal here was a little more extract. It was a promise to leave things in a better state than when I found them.
The Progress: On two projects that I am working on, I have been able to clean up some rather hairy code.

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