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 I hoped resolved to improve. This is the end of the month three and here’s my progress. Hope I’m not too late!

1. Read More
The Idea: There is so much knowledge in both books and online. It would be a worth the effort to take in some of this collective knowledge.
The Goal: My goal is to read three books this year (one every four months) and subscribe to ten good blogs.
The Progress: I finished Practices of an Agile Developer and wrote my thoughts in a review. I finished, Software Optimization Cookbook and wrote a review for that as well. Luckily, a plane ride to Denver gave me some time to make my way through most of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review.
On the blog front, my Reader is always overflowing with new items. It’s almost hard to keep up!

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: The same as usual. I’ve been doing more and more with Python. Importing more modules, making new scripts and breaking things up. Did some GUI work with matplotlib and got some pretty charts started. Pretty soon I’ll really have to get started on that Perl thing that’s been going around.

3. Be an Architect
The Idea: Where a programmer applies some duct tape to stop a leak, an architect replaces the pipeline with a better one. This is most essential to career advancement.
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: Aha! I can’t say much about this, but my idea from last month seems to be going well. Why bring water to a horse when you can bring the horse to water? Why give a man a fish when you can teach him how? That was the latest pipe replaced.

As always, I’m open to feedback. Leave some!

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