Looking back at my “Where Do You Want to Be In a Year?” blog post for the Jan 2, 2010 I want to  summarize for myself if I stand where I wanted to stand and what else could be done to improve my position. I would recommend to all of you to execute same reviewing and realize if you are moving in the right direction or not.
For the previous year I wrote 156 blog posts, read many books, performed dozen presentations, became Senior developer, passed few ms exams, decided to start my first book and did many other hopefully right things.
Remember, life is limited in time, so if you don’t move in the right direction you might waste it entirely.

So the list I had in the beginning of 2010:

By the end of 2010 I want:

1. Get Microsoft Certification:
  * MCTS (Exams: 70-536 and 70-505) SUCCESS
  * MCPD 70-563 and 70-565 (this one is big fish, but I need such!) FAIL
Ok, so I went very good with this item. I successfully passed 536, 505 and 503 exams, they lead me for passing exam 565, passing which credits Enterprise Application Developer 3.5 certification.

2. Read at least 24 books. 62,5% SUCCESS :) 37,5% FAIL
Ok, so counting only programming-related books I have 15 books read. You can see their reviews on my blog just follow this link.
I do not think that I’ve completely failed this item, since I have couple of books in progress and their review will reveal shortly on this blog.

3. Become known employee in my company, sharing knowledge and doing presentations, so will have much more authority among co-workers. SUCCESS
I took few good steps here. I performed company-wide presentation on Domain-Driven Design and of course I performed many so called developers meetings for my guys from my division.
I also performed 4 presentations outside of my company – two at Lviv .Net UG, one at Java UG and one at IT-Jam in Kharkiv.
Visited MS SWIT Conference in Kyiv.

4. Familiarize with Java and contribute research and development work to Kohonen Maps world. SUCCESS
By this link you can find out that I did some research on this matter and I’m almost 100% sure that I was first in the world who wrote parallelized algorithm for Kohonen maps with .net framework version 4.0. I even utilized some of the new concepts introduced regarding multithreading in .net 4.0. Along with this I spent some time writing same project with Java.

5. to be Senior Developer and continue growing… SUCCESS
Done! Read Friday 13th blog post. As of growing I slowed down slightly as per me. Maybe I got tired, but I developed my career plan.

6. Improve my English skills to have at least upper-intermediate strong level (according to my company graduating) SUCCESS
Definitely improved my English skills. My official level as of now is “upper-intermediate”. It might be that shortly will get “+strong” since my English course is not finished yet. But honestly I feel that I lack a lot to speak fluently. But now I can easily watch films without translation, listen podcasts, etc…

7. Gather good capital and looking for investments of money. SUCCESS
Ah! This progresses hardly, but I do a lot here. At least I got higher salary rate because of my promotion, but I started spending more money. I have to work on this more. Btw, my blog earned 4,81$ for the year, but we all know that it pays me differently.

Next thing I will create blog post “Where do you want to be in a Year?” for the 2011.
Till next time.

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