Michael Wales

Inspired by Phil Sturgeon’s own Year in Review, I thought it would be good to reflect back on 2010 and set some goals for 2011. 2010, in general, was a pretty rough year – a lot of downs and the few ups that came around were merely effects of attempting to mitigate those downs. I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail, but I sure do hope 2011 shines a bit brighter.

Personal

By far the biggest news of the year was my move to San Antonio, TX, in October, after accepting a Senior Associate position with Kforce Government Solutions, working as the Lead Developer on web-based applications for various Department of Defense organizations. Thus far, the attitude of the company, the feel of the city, and the sense of accomplishment I get from my work each and every day has done nothing but confirm this was the right move, at the right time, for me. I would be remiss if I did not thank my good friend Eric Harrison for passing this opportunity on to me – I truly believe this change will be one of the defining moments of my life that, years down the road, I look back on in amazement at how lucky I truly am.

2010 was also the year in which I took my first bit of vacation and traveled, for nothing other than leisure, as my wife and I celebrated Christmas in Las Vegas. We weren’t there to visit family, or for business, it was five days of hanging out, having a good time, without a care in the world. Las Vegas is an amazing, albeit expensive, city and I highly recommend the trip – we’ll definitely be going back in the near future.

Technology & Programming

With a Netflix subscription and a Boxee Box, we have finally completely abandoned cable/satellite providers and we could not be happier. No more commercials, no more paying for 300 channels when we only watch 10 – it was a much easier transition than I anticipated and I honestly don’t believe my daughter has noticed any difference. I’m pretty confident in saying we’ll never use a standard television provider ever again.

One of my coworkers, while still in Georgia, turned me on to the world of HD (and actually sold me my first surround sound system). As I pursued an “out with the old, in with the new” refurnishing of my living room I upgraded from a DLP to an LCD – we couldn’t be happier with the picture and sound quality and I believe I’ve found a fun little hobby to pursue outside of programming.

At the beginning of the year I was working on the CodeIgniter Cookbook, for Packt Publishing. Ultimately, the timeline just bottomed out due to various personal issues – it just wasn’t the right time for me to write a book.

2010 was a year of stagnation in the programming department, where the majority of my work involved PHP or Python and few of my personal projects garnered my interest long enough to even warrant a mention here. I did finally wrap my head around distributed version control (DVCS) and made the transition from Subversion to Mercurial. Since that transition I’ve become quite the proponent of DVCS, especially within the enterprise, and spread the good word in various speaking opportunities and consultancy gigs.

Right at the end of the year, one my personal projects really started to take shape and come to a point in which I wanted to dedicate some serious time to it. I launched AfterMil, in beta, days before the turn of the year. AfterMil focuses on delivering relevant civilian career search results to prior-military through the use of a rigid taxonomy system and various ancillary services. The comments and opinions from others after the launch has validated the fact that there is a serious need to assist our veterans, or soon to be veterans, with their career search and I hope AfterMil can provide that assistance in a clean and usable fashion.

Goals for 2011

I’ve been running MichaelWales.info for awhile now, as kind of a bio/resume site. I’m wanting to clearly define the relationship between the two domains this year and give the .info a top-to-bottom makeover. I already have some thoughts in my head of the direction I’d like to take it but it will require the services of a professional photographer, so that will come later on in the year.

AfterMil is obviously a solid idea, so I intend to continue forth with it, developing it into the easiest solution for prior-military to land a new career outside of the military. I have quite a few ideas as to how to make that happen (I’ve been there before, just 2 years ago), it’s just going to involve a lot of time and effort, not only developing but in partnerships, to really achieve my vision.

I truly believe the mobile platform has yet to take-off and believe 2011 will be the year in which everyone has a smart-phone. I don’t necessarily want to focus on development towards a specific OS (Android, iOS, etc), as I believe they suffer from a “walled garden” syndrome, but I will continue to experiment with and develop using HTML5-based technologies. By focusing on a cross-platform standard, like HTML5, I can not only further my web development skillset and marketability but still reach out and touch virtually every platform available.

I definitely want to continue travelling, for fun and leisure, and have my eyes set on Europe for our next big trip. If I could get a trip to Europe and one other vacation under my belt during 2011 I would be extremely happy. Despite all my world travels, thanks to Uncle Sam, I just don’t feel as if I’ve really been out there and seen much of anything – there are so many things I want to do, I just need to go do them.

Ultimately, I think that is my biggest goal for 2011: just do it. I’ve been a planner/analyzer for as long as I can remember, very rarely doing things on a whim. Yet, when I look back at 2010 some of the best moments where planned/executed on a whim, with little to no planning involved. In 2011, if I get an idea or a wild hair up my ass, I’m just going to go for it. Life is short and sitting around counting my rupees isn’t going to do any good in allowing me to enjoy my life – live for the moment.

Is there a topic you want me to write an article on? Today’s your lucky day! I’ve added the GetSatisfaction Skribit widget to the right-hand border of this page.

A quick click of the widget will allow you to submit ideas, a question, a problem or give me some head-bloating praise. Feel free to use and abuse but remember this is a public means of communication, if you need to contact me privately you can always email at webmaster@michaelwales.com.

Edit:
Chris Harrison pointed out Skribit to me and it is much better suited for this purpose.

As web developers we typically fulfill a number of roles: developer, designer, marketing, SEO. Of all these roles nothing is more frustrating than the designer role, primarily due to the evil that is Internet Explorer 6. Thankfully, Google has taken a stance, primarily fueled by the recent Chinese attacks, and IE6 is going down.

Last week, on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, the Senior Product Manager of Google Apps announced that as early as March 2010 Google will start phasing out support for older browsers. The official lineup Google recommends consists of Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+.

Google also sent an email to all Google Apps for Domains administrators yesterday that clarified some concerns people had: this isn’t just for the enterprise users. Users of the standard GMail and Google Calendar will see functionality dropping off on older browsers as well. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. As developers, would you expect Google to maintain two separate codebases, one of which has inherent flaws that consistently introduces security vulnerabilities? I didn’t think so…

Is this the nail in the coffin that is Internet Explorer 6? I think so! With such a drastic change from one of the industry leaders, a company most people couldn’t dream of living without in this day, older browsers have no choice but to die off. Most people using IE6, or various other older browsers, aren’t doing so by choice – they are in enterprise environments in which they are not able to upgrade. These companies are now being told by one of the largest providers of software they use on a daily basis, the time is now! If more companies, and even developers like us, took a stand like Google is we would see an end to the 8+ year browser lifecycle that IE6 has enjoyed.

After a number of months of the blog being down because WordPress decided to melt-down during an update, I finally got it back up and running. Because of the process I went about getting it up and going my older posts are lost in another database for the time being. I will be spending a significant amount of time porting those over to this new database – I’m going to try to keep the URLs the same, but you guys know me: fuck PageRank.

In the past I have tried to get some really nice themes up here thinking it would encourage me to write and share more. I’ve come to realize that’s just not true, so I will be sticking with the tried and true Simpla theme. It gives me plenty of width in the primary column to share code and that’s my goal from here on out – share code.

I’ve got freelance projects, a full-time job, a book deal, and a family up to my ears – no more trying to market myself as a freelance developer. I’ve succeeded there beyond my wildest dreams and I have to thank more of you than I can possibly name for that. From here on out, I’m going to try and improve your code – make you a better developer.

Hang in there with me – I’m pretty excited about trimming the fat and really getting deep in the content here. Better hold your watches up…