It’s been a long time since I wrote anything here, especially since I ended my last post by stating I was getting back on track and would write more soon.

Not wanting to go into too much personal detail here, suffice it to say that I’ve gone through a few transitions at my day job, met an awesome girl that I’ve been with for nearly nine months now, and have dealt with some medical-related issues all since my last post way back in July.

Despite all of this, I have made progress with my plan, and there is much more happening now.

The biggest issue I’ve encountered so far, is that it’s hard to learn how to program without programming, and it’s hard to get programming a hobby project without having some sort of idea regarding what you would like to build. This issue has finally been resolved for me as I now have a project.

With so many people producing so much work, it can be a bit difficult at times to find someone to do a review for you in a timely fashion. Various ideas have been tried to manage this process (including scheduled review shifts and a spreadsheet for making public what reviews you need done, and by when), but for various reasons each of these ideas has met with only limited success.

I’ve decided, largely for selfish reasons relating to my desire to learn C#, that the next idea on the list should be a software solution. The application itself will be fairly small in scope, but should provide enough of a challenge that I’ll learn something useful since I’ve been told time and again that the best way to learn a new language is to “use it in anger.”

Since this project won’t have any corporate support (although my team lead is aware of the idea, and is looking forward to seeing a prototype), I won’t be able to use the company’s SQL Server installation. I worked for a year doing support for in house MS Access applications (different company), so I’ve decided to just use Microsoft Jet, in the form of an Access-generated MDB file, as the first supported database engine. This is actually nice since I can start barebones with what I know, but it will force me to design the application in a modular way so that I can add support for “real” database engines in the future.

The application itself will be written in C# using the free Visual Studio 2008 Express, and will allow developers to identify peer reviews they need done. Users will be able to see all available peer reviews, optionally ordered by certain favorite items (i.e. reviews for developers they trust or could learn from, subsystems they’re particularly familiar with, etc), and assign themselves to the reviews.

There’s actually more to this than I’m writing here, but I think this is enough information for now.

More to come soon!