So the new year has started, and even though my first day of it consisted mainly of sleeping (a result of partying until 5 am and half a bottle of 18 year old Johnny Walker Gold), a few thoughts began to surface around what I wanted to achieve this year.
The first thing that sprang to mind was improving my Spanish. Even a couple of weeks here in Arequipa being basically immersed in the language hasn't boosted me as much as I'd hoped, which I suspect is mainly due to a limited vocabulary (I am better than I was though). It's time to start getting serious about it and doing some structured learning and workbooks. Luckily I will get to practice it at home.
The second thing is improving my coding skills. I started with VBA, building MS Access front ends and small Office tools. MapBasic came next, learning by doing and by trying to fix a broken application at work. The next step was converting VBA code to run in ArcGIS10, deciding on VB.NET for ease and speed reasons. I also built a few add-ins for ESRI products. I also played around with Python, mainly in ESRI again (data driven pages etc). But with such an informal path I feel like I am missing some solid background, so will be addressing this first. I may also look at learning C#, which seems to mark a person as being a more serious GIS developer type than VB.
Both of these should have immediate benefits and feedback, which hopefully should go a long way towards keeping me motivated. Plus the coding aspect (esp Python) will be important for my thesis work which is an added incentive with specific timeframes included. And writing it here gives me that much more reason to stick with it!
print "Happy New Year!"
print "¡Feliz Años!"
