It’s that time of year again — time for a retrospective on how I did on my goals for the year. I had 5 main goals for 2015:
- Job Hunting
- Conferences
- Blogging
- Programming Language Design
- Writing an Agile Book
Job Hunting
I got pretty lucky on this one. My main contract with Mercy got extended several times. Amos and I must have been doing a good job of keeping the customer happy. We even made it through a couple rounds of layoffs. I’m wrapping up the gig at Mercy now. I’m working one day a week there, as the project winds down.
I also started a new gig this month at CenturyLink. I’m working on a cloud development team. Our current project involves selling WordPress as a service. The manager had been courting me for most of the year. I’m excited about my new role; I’ll be writing about it in a blog post soon.
Conferences
I set a goal in 2014 to give my first conference talk. I accomplished that, giving an ambitious talk at RubyConf. I enjoyed having done that, and vowed to do more conference speaking.
I gave 3 conference talks in 2015. I gave a workshop on HTTP at RailsConf. I talked about immutable infrastructure at Madison+ Ruby. At RubyConf, I gave a talk on a micro-ORM I wrote. I also gave a lightning talk about Agile estimation (#noestimates).
I was an alternate speaker at Windy City Rails, but did not give my talk on Alternatives to ActiveRecord. I also went to Strange Loop, mainly to see several friends and acquaintances speak.
Blogging
I wrote 24 blog articles this year. That’s about one every other week. What really kept me going was participating in a writing pact. When the pact was going, I had a 75% blogging rate. That’s pretty good.
I’m not so sure about the quality of my blog writing though. I know that practicing writing is supposed to make you better. I know I wrote some really good articles over the past year, but I think I also wrote some articles that weren’t very good. I think sometimes the deadline has caused more harm than good. I’m not really sure what to do about that; perhaps just pushing on is the right answer.
Programming Language Design
I’ve taken a lot of notes on the design of my programming language. Any time I learn something interesting about another language, or come up with another idea, I write it down.
But I haven’t worked on the implementation. (I last worked on the implementation in 2014.) I should be experimenting with some ideas, implementing them to see how they work out. I’ve even kicked around the idea of starting with a Forth variant, just to get something working quickly.
I haven’t written any articles on my ideas this year either. My notes are pretty extensive, and it would be good to write some articles to help get my thoughts straight.
Writing an Agile Book
I’ve got some things to say about Agile, and want to write a book to express those ideas. I’ve made a start — I’ve got the chapters outlines, and have started on a few chapters. But I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like to. I shared what I’ve got with Amos, and he showed some interest in pairing with me on the writing. Hopefully we’ll work on it together in 2016 and publish it.
Other
There were a few other accomplishments that weren’t explicitly on my list, but I’d like to call attention to.
I’ve continued participating on the This Agile Life podcast. I was in 12 of the 33 episodes that were recorded in 2015. I hope to participate in more in 2016. We’re considering scheduling a standard recording night each week, which might help us record more regularly.
I recently took over as maintainer of Virtus, a library to declare attributes for Ruby model classes. I haven’t done a lot yet, since I’ve been busy with travel, vacation, and holidays. But I hope to catch up with all the pending pull requests and issues in the next month or so.
The accomplishment I’m most proud of is mentoring for the Roy Clay Sr. Tech Impact program. This is a program begun as a result of the Ferguson protest movement. We’re helping teach kids (from 14 to 25) web design and development. My personal goal was to give these kids an opportunity that they would not have otherwise had. But it turned out that some of them have actually started a business building web sites for small companies. I’m so proud of the progress they’ve made in such a short time; it’s a challenging program.
Conclusion
I’m pretty happy with my accomplishments this year. I made at least some progress on each of the goals I set. I’ve been thinking about my goals for next year; I’ll write that as a separate blog article next week.
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