It is 6:22 AM and I am the only person awake in our house. I didn’t really wanted to write a post like this but since everyone else is sleeping and I don’t want to wake them by doing other stuff, here it goes.

There are a couple of things I want to accomplish this year, here is what those things are.

Read more technical books

I read a decent amount of books every year, in 2012 I managed to read 51 books, you can see all of them here http://pinterest.com/denisgobo/books-i-read-in-2012/

What you will notice is that there is only one technical book on that list, that book is The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin (AKA Uncle Bob). Of course I have been reading technical stuff during the year but I have not read any other technical book cover to cover. I will pick up a book, read the chapters that are of interest and be done with it for the time being. There are books that I reference over and over as well, I like these books.

The latest book I picked up is The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Vital techniques of Java 7 and polyglot programming. This is a fantastic book and I will put up a review once I am done with the book

Get into different technologies

I will try getting into a couple of different things this year. In terms of SQL Server I got back into replication after a 8 year hiatus, even though it is the same product I have been using for a while now, I consider this different technology. Everything outside your comfort zone I will consider new or different. So what will I be looking for in 2013. Well, how boring really but I will take a closer look at Big Data. There I said it the buzzword of the day…Big Data. Of course you might be asking yourself what I mean by Big Data, how can you get into Big Data? I will start messing around with Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase and perhaps MongoDB, I want to get a feel for these technologies. Besides Big Data I will also start getting more involved with Java and the Java stack. Scala looks like something interesting as well. Informatica is something I will be using as well for ETL this coming year. If Microsoft releases a public CTP of the next version of SQL Server then I will definitely take a look at Hekaton, this is the in memory technology for the next major release of SQL Server

Write more blog posts and contribute more to the wiki

In 2012 I only wrote 74 posts, that is a new low point for me. In 2009 I wrote 139 posts, that is almost double the number of 2012. The goal for this year is to write 150 posts. On the wiki I haven’t done too many articles this year. I would like to change that, I will document all the new stuff I will be learning this year and will use the wiki as a cheat sheet of sorts. Since I will be adding Oracle, Informatica and Java to the skills I will be using at my job this year, expect content in those technologies as well. Having said that the main focus of the blog will still be SQL Server of course.

Go places

I plan to see more of the world this year. Our three kids are going to be nine and six years old this year. I am planning to take the family for a 2 week visit to Amsterdam this summer. I took that picture in Amsterdam in 1997, I grew up in Amsterdam, my father still lives there, I speak the language so it should be a nice trip. While in Amsterdam I also want to make a quick visit to either Germany or Belgium, this should be pretty easy since you are in either country in less than two hours. Hopefully my kids will appreciate seeing old buildings, the canals and the museums/musea. Of course we have to see the wind mills as well as the cheese market in Alkmaar. The weather in Amsterdam can be really crappy at times, I hope it doesn’t rain every single day while we are there. It will be interesting to see how the kids will act while on the first plain trip. This trip takes about 8 hours and luckily going there it is at night, if they sleep through it I will be much easier for those restless kids.

Be healthier

I guess you saw this one coming, didn’t you? Most people have this resolution, if you are gym member you will notice how packed the gym is between January 1st and January 15th. This is when people get the free trial passes to the gym, after the pass is done, so are most of the people who had those passes. My goal is to get back into running this year, nothing major, maybe twice a week for 40 minutes or so. I prefer running outside compared to a treadmill. I will be more conscious of the food I eat and how much I eat of it as well. Trying to eliminate as much sugar as possible is another of my goals. I heard it is tough for the first couple of weeks but after that your body won’t miss it. I eat all kinds of vegetables like kale, Swiss chard, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and more. I don’t think I need to add much more to my diet.

Conclusion

There are more goals I have, I don’t think it is worth sharing those, the other goals are personal or family oriented so I won’t bother you with those.

What about you, any goals or resolutions for this year?