Ugh. Eli (blog | twitter) could not have picked a worse time to tag me for this. But unless my eyes deceive me, he did just that here. Writing down goals is always a healthy thing to do though, so I will oblige. Who knows, it might help me avoid similar chaos next year at this time. And it will be a nice break from goal #1, that I’m currently caught up in.

School

This one is almost done. For nearly three years I have been going to school at night in pursuit of a Masters’ degree in Software Engineering. I finished my last class in December, and I’m currently putting the finishing touches on my thesis. I’m sure my advisor doesn’t appreciate my dragging my feet (this was supposed to be done in December as well, but is in “deferred” status now) but the last part of 2009 was *really* hard for me. It may have been “good enough” at the end of December, but I think we’ve made it really good as a result of the extra time. I’m reasonably confident that I can have this finished within a week (as long as I don’t get tagged in any other things 😉 )

Family

Barring any unforeseen incidents (and at this point, they would have to be MOST unforeseen!) there will be a Mrs. Cuse as of March 12th. We’ve been living together for over five years, so I’m not sure how much different things will be (if at all). But at least on paper, things will be different. My most important goal for the year, and possibly for the rest of time, is to be the best husband I can be.

R & R

Because of school, I did not get nearly enough of this in 2009. 2010 should prove different though. I finally got a passport in 2009 (I’ve never been anywhere that requires one) and I’ll be putting it to use in March. That should be nice. I also got an awesome new guitar as a Christmas / early wedding gift from my future brother-in-law, so I hope to spend some quality time with it as well.

Work

In the early part of 2009, we were wrapping up a conversion from Informix to SQL Server. Once that was finished, we began converting sections of our application from COM+ / XSL to ASP.net, but our progress wasn’t as fast as it could have been because it was mixed in with our usual maintenance workload. We’ve been granted (at least on paper) a three month window to focus on conversion work after our next deployment. Whether this actually happens or not remains to be seen, but I’m cautiously hopeful at present. I would like to have the entire application converted to ASP.net by the end of the year. This would make the app run much faster, and also make our maintenance work much less painful.

Hobby Programming

This has really suffered for the last year and a half or so. I still get some in, but not the focused effort I’ve had in the past. I blame it on school. I’ve been working on what I think will be a really cool website for home brewers though, and this is going to be the year it actually gets off the ground. Its’ pretty close to being functionally complete, so this should not be too difficult to accomplish. Things will get much more interesting once I have people testing it though. I’m planning to post a better description of this site in the near future so I won’t go on about it too much in this one.

Blogging

I’ve been kind of slacking on this front too. I just recently published a draft from September or something. Between the .net conversion and the big hobby project, I’m going to have a ton of things to potentially write about, so I don’t think this is going to be a problem at all. Trouble deciding what to write about should be a nice problem to have 🙂

Research

Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t think I’ll be doing anything about a doctorate this year. I would like to continue the research I’ve been doing for my thesis on evolution and quality in open source software. I’ve got a million ideas bouncing around my head at any given moment, but a few good ones that I really want to investigate further. I’d like to spend my twilight years teaching, so I could see definitely see this transitioning into doctorate studies, but for the next couple years I need a break from school. This is a longer-term goal, but I’d like to at least figure out what my next step is by the end of the year.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. There may be others but I can’t think of them right now. I will tag Christiaan Baes (blog | twitter), because even perfection needs to look in the mirror from time to time.