I really need to start recording my thoughts and bits of knowledge that I pick up.  I've been considering keeping a blog for a while but never got going, but now this seems like the right place to store and (shock, maybe even) disseminate some of that knowledge.

What sorts of things are likely to appear here?  Well given that I spend my days working in C# and my evenings trying get myself to a position where I'm comfortable with my knowledge level (I still feel way below where I want to be) most posts here will probably be around what I'm learning or trying to get to grips with.  What are these likely to be?  Well currently that might be TDD, DDD, BDD, NHibernate, IoC's, Mocking Frameworks, C# 3.0, 4.0 (member group to delegate conversion covariance & contravariance, my head just hurts typing it) etc, you get the gist.

The Alt.Net community refer to a thing called 'Continuous Improvement', the act of continuously striving to become a better developer.  This is something I’ve been practicing since moving to dot net a couple of years back without really knowing it had a name.  So what sources have I been using?

First there are the User Groups.  I started out at Ian Cooper’s (http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/) fabulous London Dot Net group, this proved to be quite a costly and long trip up into London, but the content of the sessions fully made up for that (thanks Ian, you really showed me the value of user groups, our UK community and effectively started my journey down this path).  Those great swag meisters at NxtGenUG (http://www.nxtgenug.net/) then opened an Oxford branch and this became my main user group (we even got Jean-Paul Boodhoo one evening while he was over – man is he good).  I have also popped down to Guy Smith-Ferrier’s (http://www.guysmithferrier.com/) Bristol based DotNetDevNet group (http://www.dotnetdevnet.com/) on occasion (most recently to hear Oren Eini (http://ayende.com/) talk).  Skills Matter (http://skillsmatter.com/) run some superb free evening sessions (also up in London).

Next there is the bookshelf.  This I’ll leave until the next post.

Finally, of the main sources, of course are the blogs.  These are too numerous to list, but I’ll maintain a blogroll of some of them on here.  Keeping up with the number of high quality posts that members of our community put out is in itself a full time job, but then there are the pod and screen casts that these amazing people also manage to produce, argh where is the time going to come from.  I’m currently making my way through the Autumn of Agile (http://www.autumnofagile.net/) screencast series, these are invaluable to an agile novice like me, but running now at over two hours per cast they take some watching.

Well next time I hope to take a look at what books make up my reading list.  I’m sure there will be no real surprises, but hey.