So I had a review at work yesterday, prompting this post two weeks ago, for which I got a little bit of 'stop complaining, you pansy' from a co-worker and several more words of encouragement. Well, I got my goals in order for the coming months, and I have to say: these are attainable. In fact, if I *don't* attain these or make significant progress toward them, I probably don't deserve employment anyway. The fact that I didn't actually pick them - or modify them in any way when they were presented in my review - is actually more than a little heartening. Perhaps the Universe reads my blog.
1. Attend one or two training events or courses.
Okay, so I'm going to Drupalcon DC next week, which counts toward that goal. Win! There are some codecamps coming together, so I need to sift through my inbox and see about attending one of those, too. Suggestions welcome. Man, I'm bad at making time for these things.
2. Prepare a research / white paper on implementation of MySQL clustering, failover, and high-availability in our environment.
I haven't done this in a while. Usually, I'm at companies where there are consultant dollars available or a DBA on staff with significant experience in the area. Not so where I'm at right now, at least in the LAMP stack and in this economy. It would certainly be cool to attend a $2500 training and just do a Dump at the end of it. Efficient, even. :o We'll see what I can pull together.
Aside: You know, I thought Sun's acquisition of MySQL would be a really good thing for the database from a product maturity standpoint. After all, I talked down MySQL pre-5.x features, and even said to a few people, "well, for that you'll want a real database," but now that things like (gasp!) views and other features are in there, I don't feel quite so strongly about it. I have yet to test the whole 'Now It's a Real Boy' theory, but will over the course of fulfilling this goal. MySQL totally makes sense for CMS backends, but it's not like MSSQL and Oracle are going away for enterprise applications. Just sayin', yo.
3. Submit a presentation for the next Drupalcon, as well as contributing some best practice and code snippet-y articles for an internal IT blog.
I already do a bit of the latter on my own blog, so I'll likely just post over to the other (currently nonexistent...) blog and promote the public-facing content from my own. Now, the Drupalcon preso submission is probably the biggest reach. Oddly enough, this is also one of my new year's resolutions. Uncanny. I will likely build up to this by doing a couple of local user group presos to test material. We don't have a local Drupal user group, but members of one in Rochester have interest in response to something I posted a few weeks ago.
As far as content, I'm thinking of more fully documenting one of the modules I'm currently developing - as a sort of Lessons Learned talk - or even a Drupal Through Traditional SDLC type session. I'll obviously be working toward this goal last, but you'll probably hear more about it as those ideas mature.