As my holiday vacation winds down I decided it is time to figure out what my themes are going to be for 2016. Last year I did a fairly good job at hitting the themes I laid out for the year, so I Am curious to see how it will turn out this year.

• The first theme is going to be the same. Regular updates to the blog ideally once a week, though as I saw last year I Didn’t quite make the weekly thing but I did average it given 52 posts. Hopefully I can keep the content somewhat regular this year.
• I want to continue with reading like last year, but that number will for sure drop as we are expecting a baby in February and I know depending on my sleep situation reading may go right out the window.
• At work I would like to migrate to Spring Security 4. This is going to be a bit of an annoying upgrade for us based on some of the changes, but I think this year is the year to bite the bullet and figure it out before we are dealing with Spring 5 in 2017.
• At home I would like to play around with Swift and write my first iOS app. I have been programming Java for 17 years now and I feel like mixing it up a little bit to keep things interesting. I was actually going to work on that over my vacation, but I ended up getting Fallout 4 on the Steam winter sale and messing around with that instead.
• I would like to restructure our webapp at work from an EAR Structure to a WAR structure. If that is successful I would then like to move away from JBoss to Tomcat. And if I got really crazy I would like to end up converting our Spring App to a Spring Boot App which would be a massive restructuring our our application. I think if I could accomplish all of that we would be in a great place going forward, but this is pretty ambitious as a side project and not sure I will be able to find the hours to get us all the way there.
• I think it would be cool to contribute some sort of patch or something into the openjdk or Spring just to say I have contributed there. It just depends if I find enough time to find a small issue and work it out and do so.

At the end of the day whether or not I do any of these things doesn’t matter too much to me. It is sort of just setting some sort of milestones to track how my year is going. The main purpose of this blog is just keeping myself accountable so that I am always sort of improving a little bit each day, so if I find that I have nothing to write about then I can see I am not pushing myself hard enough to learn something new. Here is to another great year.

I had mentioned previously that I wanted to learn Swift over thanksgiving. I ended up taking the Objective C course instead at code school as I didn’t see an option for Swift and I find code school a fun way to get an intro to something. Lo and behold this week I got an email from them and they now have a free Swift Course. Today is my last day of work for the year so I am planning on playing around with this course and messing around with a basic app over the Christmas break. So Code School thank you for the early Christmas present. I will follow up with my thoughts on the language and on iOS development after playing around with it.