29 to 30–Q1 Review (Feb to April)

So the first quarter has drawn to a close so lets review where I got to with the objectives I set myself …

1. Launch personal website

I achieved this quite early on in the quarter. This was a site I’d been playing with, tweaking and re-writing a number of times over the past 6+ months. I finally decided that I’d got it to a point and published it. My problem is I never seem to be completely happy with what I write and want to put it out perfect. This doesn’t work in real life, so now I’ve got my site out there and there is a platform to build on and improve instead of striving for perfection, missing it and never getting anything into the world.

2. Run competitive 10km race

On the 15th April 2012 I took part in the 10km Regency Run in Leamington Spa. I completed the course in 54mins 52 seconds. I’m proud that I did it under my target time of an hour and glad that between my wife (@lau84) and I managed to raise almost £200 for Pancreatic Cancer Action.

3. Play disc golf right handed again

Unfortunately I have missed this. I had a set back with my recovery from surgery mid Jan to March and only now I’m starting to get back into going to the gym for a workout. My running has been going quite well recently and general fitness is pretty good so I don’t think it will be much longer (fingers crossed). I have been playing left handed and competed in the Bristol Open 2012 on the last weekend of April playing lefty.

4. Sand and paint the doors and frames upstairs in house

Missed this too. Due to my shoulder recovery set back I have not been able to do this. It will be on the list for next quarter so at least by the time the kitchen is done the upstairs should be looking a bit better.

5. Blog more

This was a bit of a woolly objective, you’ve got to have one woolly objective! I’m going to say I’ve hit this as along with my objectives posts I have done a couple of posts about other stuff with the highlight being a public refactoring exercise laid down by K. Scott Allen of OdeToCode fame which was reviewed by the man himself and my code can be found on Github. Totally going to count this as achieved!

An answer to OdeToCode–A refactoring experiment

I was shown a blog post by @MrKevHunter on OdeToCode.com earlier today which was partial interview question / partial skills exercise to flex your brain and coding ability.

So at lunch time I forked and pulled the code down and set about the little exercise. My first attempt was exactly that a first attempt. I wasn’t overly happy with it but generally it was ok. So on the way home I decided to continue the refactoring and have come up with a solution which I’m much happier with and have pushed that up to Github.

Let me know what you think … https://github.com/WestDiscGolf/Katas

Kev’s version can be found : https://github.com/MrKevHunter/Katas

And the original (if you want a go) can be found: https://github.com/OdeToCode/Katas

Thanks for the challenge Scott!

Help the world; help your Granny upgrade

As a web developer having to support multiple browsers can be (very) painful at times. Getting your client to agree on which browsers need to be supported for your project and ruling out older ones is a good way forward, but until we get people to upgrade and stop using older browsers then there will always be people trying to look at your site in IE6 and wondering “why does it look this bad?”

Personally that makes me sad.

Just think … you can make a difference this Easter! When you go and see your relatives (parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts etc.) this Easter weekend coming have thought for your loved ones and the offense they may see online. Remember why we celebrate Easter and while you go to church and/or sit down to eat a lovely roast dinner with your family be a loved one and click windows update and get the latest version of Internet Explorer (or download another latest version browser).

Remember, the sooner we get people not using it the sooner more people get to use websites around world the way they were designed to be used!

Help get this percentage down this Easter (at time of writing globally 7.1% / UK 1.4%) … http://www.ie6countdown.com/

29 to 30–Q1 Objectives (Feb to April)

After thinking through what I want to achieve in the next few months taking into account my recover from shoulder surgery I have come up with the following personal objectives for the first quarter of this little experiment.

1. Launch personal website
2. Run competitive 10k race
3. Play disc golf right handed again
4. Sand and paint the doors and frames upstairs in house.
5. Blog more.

Lets see how it goes …

29 to 30–Business Plan

The past couple of years I’ve found that some things have been stumbled into or nothing has been done for a while and before you know it its the summer, then Christmas and another year has gone. So this year is going to be different!

Companies have business plans and quarterly objectives to help give guidance as to where the board want the company to go, what they want to achieve etc. so I’m going to have a go at applying this to my life this year and see what happens. Remember that quarterly objectives are there to stretch ambition they are not set because they will be easy.

The premise is I’m going to break the year into four quarters; February to April, May to July, August to October and November to January. So by the time I hit 30 I will have a defined set of objectives I wanted to hit and see where I get to. I’m going to try and decide on 5 objectives per quarter and any I don’t hit in that period will be rolled over into the next assuming they are still applicable. The idea isn’t that I end up in Q4 with 20 things to achieve but to make my 30th  year productive and structured and not just be sailing through life. Obviously things will come up and priorities will change but that’s life, this is here purely for me to try and make sure I do something with it.

As companies have objectives they also have bonus incentive schemes and so do I. For each of the objectives I hit I will allow myself to spend £20 on something fun, something which I wouldn’t normally buy unless I’d been saving for (I know this is a kind of saving scheme, but its in an unorthodox fashion) or something impulsive. It’s almost like paying myself to do something for myself.

So why am I posting this online, one single reason; accountability. I could write them up, work through the objectives through the year and at the end go “look what I’ve managed to achieve this year” however it won’t show what I’ve missed, how its progressed through the months and won’t be documented.

Let the experience begin …