So, the first period of ILP time is over, and I've managed to use 50-60 hours of my allocation attending workshops, watching presentations, learning stuff and doing ideas project work.
Learning:

  • Started reading through the Opera web standards curriculum to ensure my knowledge was up to date
  • Attended various presentations including: Stress Management, Zen and the craft of software development, Introduction to unit testing with nUnit, CSS3: Third time's the charm, Comet (a presentation by Simon Willson who came in kindly to talk to us), Basic NLP and hypnosis, SQL Server Advanced, Vision and Goal setting, Theories of Management and Javascript inheritance


Ideas:

  • Looked into DBVerse, a database deployment tool, to see if this would help us. Review here
  • Looked into Tarantino, another database deployment tool. Review here
  • Worked with Bruce to start writing a database deployment tool to meet our specific requirements. This is still ongoing and will continue into the next few months
  • Attended Hackday 3 and worked on some keyword searching work with Chris
  • Looked into Stylecop, a code style analyser. Review here


Now I have to start planning out the next years allocation - I'm cashing in a couple of days to attend the ReMix UK conference, I'm going to continue attending Simon's management and leadership courses, as well as his NLP related ones. I'm also hosting 2 sessions in the next month - one which is SQL Snap, based on CSS Specificity snap and one which is an experimental SQL Coding dojo. I'm sure I'll report back on both of these afterwards.