Summary of the year 2011

I am continuing my series of annual retrospectives from 2010, 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005...


There just a couple of things that probably deserve a brief mention about the year 2011:

• I've been given recently a new role in the company I work for - to lead the development of one of our products. It's an interesting challenge. I am a bit reluctant to get overly specialized, since till now I've been contributing in a much broader scope, but on the other side there are benefits in working in a more narrow context.
• In the last month or so, I've been active in improving the company development process - mainly by assessing our current tools and practices and searching/evaluating others. Most likely we will soon transition to a better version control system (PlasticSCM) and a more powerful issue tracking system (Jira). We might also adopt various other tools to improve our productivity in different parts of the development process.
• As the previous year, I continued to participate in our developers hiring process (helping with the job ads text, and in candidates assessment). I think I am getting pretty good in guessing  just by looking at a CV a developer's abilities, strengths and weaknesses, (well, the candidate's code still surprise me occasionally, usually unpleasantly ;) ).
• Mid-year I returned back for a couple of months to my old duties as a Support manager, but hopefully it was temporary. The next year I don't expect to be involved much in this type of work.
• Technology-wise, there were not that many novelties worth mentioning, besides me getting to know MS SQL Server much better. I planned and participated in supporting of MSSQL as a backend for our applications (we supported only Oracle until recently). Learned a lot from this - e.g. the differences in the default locking models of Oracle/MSSQL turned out to be interesting. Although new technologies are now introduced in our development at a slower rate, I am trying to keep up-to-date with everything interesting in the software development field. Besides the .NET related stuff, there are so many exciting trends to follow, e.g. NoSQL comes easily to mind. And of course, there's much more than the programming frameworks, libraries and tools, it's a big universe...

This pretty much sums it all. Hope that the year 2012 would offer a lot of excitement and positive experiences.