New year meme

Tarek Ziades repeated his Python new year meme in which he summarizes his accomplishments in the Python world this year and his considerations for the new year. As I stopped working as a Python developer some time ago, I will hence drop the Python restriction although I will keep the restriction on only looking at developer questions.

1. What’s the coolest developer application, framework or library you have discovered in 2011?

Mostly stuff I already new about but hadn't specifically the chance to use previously, so actually there was probably nothing which I would call 'cool'. For one, I started using git this year. For other projects, I took the next step and started hosting my Mercurial repositories at bitbucket. For another, I used nose for unit testing my Python stuff.

2. What new programming technique did you learn in 2011?

Probably the most interesting stuff I learned this year was from me finally reading AMOP (the Art of the Meta-Object Protocol), thereby learning a lot about the meta object protocol in Common Lisp and how it's related to CLOS. However, I didn't really put it to use much, although in hindsight I recognized that I've used stuff from it previously without understanding the complete picture. There was also a lot of 'enterprise technology' I looked into this year but nothing could be directly be labeled a 'programming technique'. Otherwise I think I mainly stuck to the techniques I'm used to.

3. What’s the name of the open source project you contributed the most in 2011? What did you do?

My contributions to the free software world continue to be at a very low level (typically, I don't contribute anything of value besides small hints on the net, complaints and the occasional bug report), which I keep seeing as a personal weak spot. This year at least I managed to implement something for CL-SQL. I also wrote two small utilities, mainly to scratch my own itch, which I still need to clean up a more before I could publicly present them.

4. What was the development blog or website you read the most in 2011?

That's certainly proggit, followed by InfoQ. I also follow Planet Lisp and Planet Python quite closely. I started again to listen to the podcasts by Heise developer and the software engineering radio, but I have to admit I'm too easily distracted to really keep going.

5. What are the three top things you want to learn in 2012?

I would like to continue to learn Clojure, finally writing some useful code in it. In particular, I would like to mess around with parallel computations, although there is a huge chance I'll apply it for small silly tools or web programming first. I would also like to work on some semantic web stuff, probably with RDFa. And maybe I'll take a look at programming with some of the more or less free tablet stuff, either WebOS or Maemo/Qt. I'll probably also continue to look into Java programming and common architectures on that platform, which is an enormous universe.

6. What are the top software, app or lib you wish someone would write in 2012?

I would like to see the semantic web getting a little bit more traction, mainly by easy integration of stuff like RDFa into content management systems. And, like probably every year since 1999, I wish somebody would finally write an (open source) application/set of clients to finally solve the synchronisation problems between different computers/phones/tablets. Note: I've given up on the wish that somebody writes an enterprise acceptable open source replacement for Lotus Notes or Outlook (and I'm talking only about calender and mail, sigh).