My 2011 Q1 developer roadmap

For me, 2011 Q1 has so far been a good exposure to new techniques, tools, articles and books, thanks to ThoughtWorks book allowance! However, if you are interested, here's what's keeping me busy:
  1. User Experience: I find a good user experience is THE thing that you want in anything you design, and if you are writing a software, its even more important. After I read a few books, I have a feeling that its not just a common sense approach, it takes some education and a deep care to produce something usable. Check out my reading list at http://smsohan.com
  2. HTML5: HTML5 is so more than just knowing How To Meet Ladies (HTML)! The popular browsers are all way ahead of the official HTML5 release date, so if you are building something on the web, its time you give it a real shot. Again, I shared my reading list on my website.
  3. .NET NuGet: Microsoft .NET just got a major component, NuGet package manager, that greatly simplifies the sharing and consuming of reusable libraries. Already there are tens of thousands of downloads for the popular .NET libraries and I believe its just a start. So, if you've done something cool in your project and want that to share with the .NET crowd, you should consider NuGet as a distribution channel and get some traction on it.
  4. MvcMailer: MvcMailer has got all my developer attention in the recent past. If you haven't checked already, I highly encourage you take a look at its features at this page and you'll see its a full stack elegant emailing solution that you need in your ASP.NET MVC projects. However, while working on this, I got familiar with the internals of the ASP.NET MVC source code and I consider this as a good experience.
  5. Functional Programming: Did you learn one? Which one? Please suggest me your favorite functional language. In the remaining of this Q1, I want to spend some time on a functional programming language, probably F#.
Its inspiring to see Calgary getting warmer these days - hope we get some outdoor soccer by the end of 2011 Q1, that would be awesome!

Comments

Sohan
Thanks for sharing the link. I started reading the online book at http://www.ctocorner.com/fsharp/book/
I like the approach in this book as it goes easy on the functional stuff for someone like me whose brain is prefilled will OO stuff!
Alexander Beletsky
I'm also going to learn F#.. But I would like to start with fundamentals, istead of language itself.

I'm considering this book to start:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Its availble in pdf, as well :)