Jeremy Durham

Everyone has New Year’s resolutions, so here’s mine:

This year I’ve resolved to take baby steps, starting with The Calendar About Nothing. So far, I haven’t broken the chain. Let’s meet back here in December and see if my streak is at 365, shall we?

As a further step to that, I’ve resolved to be open. Very open. I’ve already started the process, putting several libraries on Github that I am working on. I am going to be pushing out anything that I am legally able to, to Github.

I also decided that I really miss music, so I bought the wife a guitar (Epiphone Les Paul Special), borrowed her old guitar and started learning. I can already read music from my orchestra days, so it was just learning the hard stuff. The goal is to practice every day, but most likely it’ll be 3-4 times a week.

Lastly, I’ve decided that this is the year to get out there and network, etc. Living the last four years in the Rails community has shown me that it’s not necessarily the best people who get the farthest, but usually the best networkers. I’m not necessarily looking to get the farthest, but it’s always nice to not fade away either. It’s sad that salesmanship is an important part of being excellent in my chosen profession, but there you have it.

Related to getting out and networking, I will be teaching a Ruby and Rails class at the CCAE in Cambridge MA. The class will be ultra-cheap (<$200), last 8-weeks, and hopefully while cramming a lot of material into a short amount of time, teach the students enough about Ruby and Rails to be successful. The class starts April 7th from 8-10pm. I don’t get paid based on how many students there are, just in case you’re wondering.

I’m also flirting with the idea of starting a polyglot programming group in the Boston area. Getting people with many different language interests and expertise together to share ideas, tips, and tricks. I’ll keep you updated on that.

This small list should keep me going for another year, at least!