Happy New Year and I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.  This year is going to bring about some new challenges for me on the work front.  I'll be off of the current Plumtree project by the end of Q1 and begin working on our clinical applications.  I'm truly hoping this will be a good switch and continue to be knee-deep in coding .NET.

I've been working really hard on sharpening my OOD skills, use of design patterns, and refactoring.  It has been great and I just want to get better at it with each project.  I also enjoy sharing this with co-workers who may not be taking the time to learn this stuff and I hope to get us to start having code-reviews earlier in the development process so things like this can be added in during and not after.

One thing I think we find tricky about code-reviews is that everyone has to have the right attitude about them.  Some guys are just defensive when anyone speaks up with a question or suggestion.  Or from the other point of view, the people raising their opinions are not very couth in their approach.  Everyone has an ego but we all want to get better and one of the best ways to share and learn with your peers.

If you're like me, you tend to learn things a little better if you have to explain how something works.  More than once in a code-review I've been asked why I chose a certain design or logic flow.  Sometimes I can't explain it (just one of those coding paths you down sometimes) and then I get opinions on different ways to do it.  I figure if I can't remember why I did it a certain way then I must be willing to change it for the team...right?  I'm always will and eager to make my code and the teams code better.

Anywho, just some thoughts running through my head tonight and since I've not been blogging much I wanted to write these down before I wake up tomorrow and forget what they were.