Had a meeting the other day. A good one. Managed to get a realistic(ish :) schedule approved for the next 10 weeks. Managed to slip in two weeks of “leave me alone I'm organizing things.” That's good. Should be enough time for me to tie up some loose end on all the Subversion / Nant / Nunit / CruiseControl.NET / Backup / Network / Infrastructure / Documentation work that I've sort of been trying to squeeze in around the edges of my 'other work' for the last few months. Also managed to squeeze in some time to go diving at the end of January, and drinking at the end of February. Awesome.
Anyway, I've got my work cut out for me. I've got my requirements largely documented, high-level design mostly done, for about 7 deliverables. One's a pretty big one. The schedule was re-jigged at the last minute to prioritise that one. It'll be challenging. I'm going to have to bust out the old VB6 IDE and Access 97 in the next week or two and do some maintenance programming too. Eeek.
That's not what I'm here to talk about though. That's just the background. The point is that I've got some time to myself for a few days. Decided to catch up on some reading. Got a whole heap of new books recently:
Linux in a Nutshell, Refactoring, Rapid Development, Mastering Regular Expressions, Windows Script Host, and Code Complete. (I got Death March too, but I've already read that from cover to cover.. :)
Sort of skimmed through all of them. Going to spend a couple of days diving into few of them. The good thing about books is that I can take them with me. On trains, to my family's place, etc. It is the silly season after all.
Some time spent on 'professional development' seems like a good idea to me. With any luck, I won't learn anything that I didn't already know.. ;)