Things Learned in 2011 and Plans for 2012

I keep telling junior software developers that the only way to maintain their expertise and to become better developers is a continuous learning process. 2011 has been a very productive year for me (and many others at SELA!), and I am looking forward to 2012, the year of Windows 8, in eager anticipation. Below are some of the things I learned in 2011 and some of the things planned for 2012.

Learned in 2011

Most of Q1 2011 I was working on the brand-new Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 course with Bnaya Eshet. I’ve been using the TPL for a while before that, but writing slide decks, labs, and demos – culminating in actually teaching the course – is definitely the best way to learn a subject of this magnitude.

Later during the year I updated the Windows Concurrent Programming course (for C++/Win32 developers), including brand new content on ConcRT, synchronization and threading internals, and a bunch of new hands-on labs.

Back in 2010 I delivered a user group presentation on C++0x, which emerged as a final standard in late September. At the December SDP, Noam Sheffer and I delivered a whole day on the new C++11 language standard and standard library, which involved getting all the nitty-gritty details of the new language syntax (such as perfect forwarding, which I find the hardest “feature” to teach).

Next up is JavaScript. Yes, seriously. If you ever talked to me for more than a few minutes you know that I hate UI development in general, and Web development in particular. However, this was a gaping hole in my understanding of Web-related performance problems and bugs, and a gaping hole in the “general education” of any software developer. So I forced myself to relearn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and used the opportunity to learn the new HTML5 JavaScript APIs, jQuery, and even node.js (which should be the subject of another post).

Another thing I was always very interested in but rarely had the time to invest in professionally is security research. Although my day job usually does not involve any serious security research, I like to keep my general knowledge up to date by subscribing to vulnerability disclosure lists, following notorious security researchers, practicing simple exploitation and reverse-engineering scenarios with modern tools, and so on. In 2011 I invested in my reverse engineering skills and some modern exploitation techniques such as ROP.

Any list summarizing 2011 will be woefully incomplete without mentioning Windows 8. At //build we saw a glimpse of what’s to come in 2012, but the Windows 8 Developer Preview is already an exciting consumer experience and an exciting target for software development. I wrote an article on Windows 8 security aspects [pdf, Hebrew] and presented Windows 8 at the December SDP keynote, but there’s obviously much more to learn here, and I’ll leave it to 2012.

Finally, here’s a grocery list of some smaller things I learned in 2011 (some of which I don’t understand yet in a professional capacity):

• Windows Phone
• GPGPU, specifically C++ AMP
• Fundamentals of hardware architecture
• Refreshment of Windows Internals for Windows 7
• DBX debugger on Solaris
• CLR Debugging API

Planned for 2012

2012 is going to be remembered as the year of Windows 8. With a sharp turn to a new runtime, development framework, UI style, and form factors – it’s inevitably going to take quite a while to learn and practice. From what I’ve seen so far, it will be fun :-)

General-purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) is becoming mainstream, especially with an awesome framework like C++ AMP behind it. In 2012, I hope to find opportunities to use C++ AMP in a real project, and expand my understanding of the underlying GPU concepts.

Finally, on a less professional level, I plan to expand my horizons in Web application security, specifically new advances in HTML injection, smart XSS attacks, crypto weaknesses, and similar topics.

Now, if I had to guess in 2010 whether I will be spending time on Solaris or JavaScript in 2011, there’s no way I’d say yes. I’m really looking forward to January 1, 2013 to see what actually happens in 2012 :-)