One way to pull up personal learning curve

Last 3-4 years I've made a "plan" (my new years promise) of techniques or frameworks that I should study during the next year. The listed techniques are more or less items that I personally just find cool or they are really useful in my knowhow.

I remember when I first started this, my list was huge. I think it had more than 10 items in it or so. I thought that "I can handle all of this in one whole year". Well, till the end of the year I think I checked only couple of them. The list was just way too long. First lesson learned was that I was focusing on way too many things and my time was sliced on way too many things so I actually just scratched the surface on everything and really learned nothing (so to say). As my defence, at that time I had just jumped into J2EE world and everything was totally new for me (and I love coding Java) but still. The obvious second lesson learned was to keep the list short (and simple). From that I had only 3-4 items on my list and I have found that that is good practise. Some times even that is too long. Besides 4 items is really easy to devide to a year :)

The reason why I'm doing this "study list" is simple. I found out that a list like this really helps me to focus on learning the "right things". The things that I really need to learn. The list is there also to remind what to do if I find out some extra time and don't have anything to do. Lately I haven't found time slots like these, but you never know ...

Last year one the main techniques was to learn XPages. The others were related more or less to J2EE world (Spring Framework 3.x version, JPA etc) and they were more or less left out from my learning scope. With XPages I succeeded quite well. I think my previous Domino and Java / J2EE experience helped a lot to adopt the XPages world. The 3rd place in the OpenNTF Custom Control development contest (1st contest) gave me a huge boost to dive even further in to the world of XPages. Coding  XPages is fun.

For upcoming year I have listed following techniques that I'll study (in no order):

- XPages mobile applications (Extension library components, Dojo mobile)
- Learn more JavaScript and Dojo
- HTML5

Big things in the list again, but I think and I hope that I find both motivation and time to learn all of these, especially the HTML5 seems really interesting.