My todo list for work in 2016

Its 2016 and I like to make a list of things I wanna look into and put into place at work so here is a list of things I am aiming to do which also includes at my job in 2016:-

  • A blog post each week, last year I only managed 11 blog posts and that’s poor, so more blog posts will come in 2016.
  • Lightning Talks, we have started doing these at work and this year I plan to do a few of them if given the chance, I’m doing one on the 6th of January on as Developers Top 10 Best Practices which I will share about once I have done my talk.
  • Test 3rd party end points, have a dashboard page which tells us what is up and what is down, going to try to use the Chrome add-on called Postman and use collections within Postman to do this.
  • Database Deployments, currently we manually script everything and then get the dba to run the scripts in manually, we need to script the database and put it into Source control each release as a starting point, I’m looking forward to this as it well help aid with our deployments and speed them up. Hoping to get the RedGate Sql Toolbelt into the company so we can use this to help us achieve this.
  • Red/Green deployments, we currently deploy at weekends and this can and should change so that we aren’t spending time at weekends doing releases which take quite a lot of time, we can automate them more and this year I plan to fix that.
  • More Testing, we are closing in on unit testing our PowerShell scripts, this will be another nice addition to the number of different areas which we are currently testing which is great.
  • Code Reviews, need to figure out a way that keeps everyone from being bored, brings benefit to the team and keeps us developers on our toes going forward.
  • Continuous Improvement, test more, more in-depth code reviews, automate more, release finished work, tackle the back log each sprint.

That’s it for now, I will add to this lost throughout the year as we go, i will keep an eye on this post and how we get on and blog about each one individually, hopefully I’ll get the chance to work on some if not all of these this year.

Feel free to follow me on twitter at @gsuttie