Building Better Developers, Holiday Special: Reflecting on the Year's Progress

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We as you may have noticed by the little turkey gobble are up to our annual holiday specials, getting into some of those. Yes, we will still between Thanksgiving and the Christmas New Year's stuff, have a couple more episodes, have some special topics. We're going to have a couple of more people we're going to interview, continue to bring you the good content. But it feels like this being a week of American Thanksgiving, a good time for us to like pause a little bit and think about what are we getting into. And right now the thing is we're getting into a holiday season. Or also, even if it's not necessarily a holiday season for you, it is getting towards the end of the year. So this is a good time for us to sit back a little bit, have a find some time for a retrospective. And we're going to talk a little bit more specific about the find the time part of it. But the retrospective piece is really what I want to talk about. It's what I want to focus here in our holiday week. The idea here being that hey, during this week, hopefully, now if you're in retail, yes, you're going to have a very busy time. But if it happens to be a week where you have a lighter schedule, where you get in the office and a lot of people are on vacation and things like that and so you actually have some time to think, take advantage of that. Get a pencil and paper or if you like to do electronic notes or however it is and probably crack open your calendar or status reports or something like that and start with this sort of walkthrough of the year that's gone by. You don't have to go deep into it, but just sort of like flip through some stuff or look at your calendar or whatever it is that says, what did you do this year? What has been going on this year? What is it that has occupied your time that you have done this 40 hours a week for the last whatever it is, 40 weeks or more, however long we are into the year, that's a lot of time. There is a lot that you have probably done. You've probably covered a lot of ground. So in that, it's worthwhile, particularly, actually I was going to say particularly if you have a, if you're working for a single company, but probably even more so if you're a contractor, consultant, you got some side hustles where you have many, many projects that you've worked on or many, many, I will say large-ish tasks that you've worked on and by large-ish tasks or projects, what I'm really looking at here is like, what are the things that if you were going to build a resume for this year, what are the things that you would put on it? Use level of tasks. Now it gets challenging sometimes because if you've worked on 15 different projects, that could be 15 different items because you could have different technologies, different skills, different problems solved and that's where this retrospective is useful to us because we're going to look at what did we do. Yes, we're going to, at some point we're going to look at this and say, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? Where do I want to do this differently next time? Or do I not want to do this at all next time? Things like that. The kinds of decisions you would normally make in a sprint as a team where you would get together and say, what did we do right? What did we do wrong? What do we want to do more of? What do we want to do less of? This is more of your personal time. When you've got a holiday or a downtime or even a long weekend or something like that every so often and by that probably maybe not any more often than once a quarter, probably more like once or twice a year, it is very valuable to look back at what you've done and have your personal retrospective. And we've talked about these before about the idea of your personal retrospective or a career annual retrospective. I happen to talk about these just about every year because it is something that is very valuable to us. It is not helpful to always look forward and just be driving ahead, driving ahead, driving ahead because that really stops you from learning as much from what you've done and what your experience is. And in particular in our very fast moving world of technology, regardless of what your whether you're a consultant or you work for a company full time, there's still probably a lot that you do in a given year that is worth note, that is something that you would actually at some point want to have on a resume to be able to refer back to it. Now the challenge is that can make for a very large resume. So we have to find ways to summarize. Sometimes if we just did a sentence for each project that we did during the year, we would have like a page per year, probably more. So there's ways that we want to combine stuff and massage stuff. And that's what we can do within this retrospective is we're not going to necessarily look at individual tasks or experiences or events, although those may be valuable. What we really want to do is look at it a little bit more holistically because yes, there's going to be specific things that are, you know, I don't want to do that kind of project, or I hate that environment or that language, or I love writing code in that language or with that IDE or working with that team or all those things. However, what we want to do here is think a little bit more as the year and the year as a whole. How did it progress? Where have you been? Where did you go? How did you get through the year? And we're going to get a couple of things out of this that are very valuable. One is we're going to see that you did cover a lot of space. You covered a lot of distance. Wherever you were January 1st, you are most likely very, very different where you're at here. Whether you're one year into your career or 40 years into your career, you probably got a lot done. If you look back, most likely there were a lot of projects that you worked on and things that were accomplished and features that were created and stuff like that. Now, yeah, you may still have, you may be on like the project from hell where you're still in that same project. You were working on this project January 1st. You're still working on it now. However, I just about guarantee, unless your year has been really bad, you have added a lot. That project has dramatically grown in that period of time. There is a lot of ground that has been covered. Even if it's a project that ends up running in circles, you can go back and look and say, oh, wow, we were in that circle and then we were in that circle and then we were in that other circle. Even in those situations, you can see where you covered a lot of ground and most likely there were some lessons learned. Really very critical lessons learned. One, we're going to look at what we did and realize that we actually do get stuff done. This helps for imposter syndrome and those kinds of things where you may feel like occasionally you've got the little demons, the angel and devil on your shoulder. You've got the one that's telling you you're not really that good, you haven't got a lot done, you're not worth it, blah, blah, blah, those kinds of negative things. Sometimes you can look at your track record and say, nope, not a lot of negative stuff or it's not all negative stuff. I have advanced. I have learned things. I have experience. You can get it from a positive point of view. Another thing is that when we look at it in a whole, we start seeing trends. You can think about any data points. If you have a bunch of data points and you're just looking at each data point, you can say, yeah, that was good or that was bad or however it is, you can evaluate it on a point, point, point basis. But when you start drawing a line through those and connecting the dots as it were, you start to see trends. This is something that is very valuable for us to do in a retrospective is to look at where are we trending. Are we trending in a certain way towards certain technologies? Are we trending away from certain technologies? This includes our actual work and it's also our view of that work. Could it be that we are in a rut? We may not notice that until we connect the dots and realize it's a flat line. Our trend line is not going anywhere. Or it could be that our trend line is going off a cliff, but we don't really see that until we step back and look at it and go, oh my gosh, for example, this technology that I thought was huge in January, nobody even knows what it is anymore. Now in November or December, those things happen. There are things that we planned for. We had things that were probably goals that we set back in January that it's not until we look back that we go, oh yeah, that was something I was going to do. That was critical or important to me then and now it's not for whatever reason. Now that's part of the retrospective is look at those trends, look at our current view of the year going by and are there some things that fell through the cracks? Are there some things that fell through the cracks, but we want them to stay in the cracks? We're like, okay, I don't really need that. I don't need to mess with it because these things are what we want for lack of a better term bouncing around in our head for the next few weeks or even months as we're getting to the end of the year and we're thinking about what do we want to do? We're building our plans out for the year ahead because we want to learn. We want to see what was our experience this year and this is a very personal thing so it's very helpful for us personally. What is it that I wanted to do? What is it that I was asked to do? What did I do? What did I accomplish? What fell apart? What was good? What was bad? Looking at those trends, those groups should help you quite a bit as you're looking forward into your head to say, what is it that I want to do this year? Or what is it that I feel I need to do as well? Because sometimes those trend lines are going to say, you know what, you have had a challenge after challenge after challenge in your projects because you didn't know X and so it's time to go spend some time mastering or learning X. And now I don't mean Twitter X or what used to be called Twitter but it could be, for example, maybe in project after project you got just beat up because you were struggling with let's say JavaScript. You had all these little JavaScript problems or problems that had to be solved in JavaScript. You don't really know it. It's always been like a secondary thing but now you look back and you see on the trend that it has plagued you. It has been a problem. And that is a skill that you need. And so maybe you say, okay, and I would recommend you do if you've had challenges with it and it's continuing to come up, it's like, okay, it's not going to go away. It's not going to die. I need to just bite the bullet and learn this enough. And there's all sorts of things that if you look back, those sorts of things will build you as your career professionally, your ability to complete tasks, your ability to serve your customers or your boss or whoever it is that you're serving because you're going to see in these trends weaknesses. You see gaps. And now as you're planning for the year ahead, those gaps can help you figure out what you need to do next year because it's not just about what we want to do, although that is definitely a big part of it. We also, if we're going to grow and we're going to become better developers, we need to figure out where the gaps are. And that could be, there's like places that a lot of developers will find those gaps. For example, testing. There are a lot of developers out there that just really struggle at being able to write a test, even a unit test, much less a system test of some sort or some sort of regression testing where you're really trying to get serious coverage and things like that, that these QA and tester concepts that developers don't really mess with very often because they've got a QA team or something like that that takes care of a forum in theory. And so maybe now's the year, this is the year, this is the time for you to learn more about testing. It could be completely self-serving and I could say, oh, by the way, we do have some testing courses out at school.developer.com. Go ahead and check them out. Shameless little plug. That's not why I went to the testing thing. There are areas like that that it is helpful for us to pick up. Databases are an example because I have lived this a couple of times where I hadn't, initially I had almost no knowledge and that kept being a problem. It kept slowing me down. And so I had a little foundation on knowledge and I got a little further into stuff and I realized, no, I needed deeper knowledge. And after a little bit of time, I said, all right, I'm going to go, like, that's going to be the thing I tackle. And it's a good area because there's the idea of just being able to do anything with a database. Like, okay, you can insert and you can select, you know, very simple, do very simple SQL stuff, for example, or get just date, you know, put data into and get very specific data out of some sort of a no SQL database. And that may be all you need, but as you get further along, you're going to realize that there usually are more complex queries and combinations and summations and all of those kinds of things that go into working with data. Maybe like we have at RB Consulting, you've seen that there's a lot of integration and scraping stuff that's out there. And so maybe that's where you want to look at what you did and sort of, you know, a callback, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of a resume and putting stuff on your resume. Maybe you want to look at that and say, look at your year behind what's gone on and say, huh, here is the trending type of project or the trending technology. Where have I done this in the last year so that I can take that and pull it out of my list of tasks and turn it into something that's a really good resume item if you're looking for a job or if you're trying to land a project, if you're out there consulting or you've got some little side hustle. If you know that there are certain things that are going to be hot skills or questions are going to be asked of those that win the project, then take a look back at your, you know, the year that's gone by and adjust, you know, pull those items out. They're going to be able to address that concern or that question. Likewise, if you've had projects that have been lost or jobs that you tried for, that you applied for, that you didn't win, where, and it's not, I know this is a harder one because we don't usually get good feedback when we are not selected, but we sometimes can look back at that job posting or think about the interview and the questions that we couldn't answer and say, okay, do I really want, do I want that job anyways? They didn't get it. They didn't give it to me. I lost that, you know, that job or that project. But is that something that actually I would like to go back at some point and be able to have that kind of job or do that kind of project? If so, let's look at where I feel there were gaps or maybe that they told me that there they said that, you know, somebody was more experienced in this or that, or that there was something that they had been involved with that I didn't have. So maybe this is where I can look at it and say, all right, I'm going to go add that into my list of things to do next year. It's a skill I want to do or experience I want to have or something like that. And then figuring out sort of getting that almost like a laundry list of things that I want to do or feel like I need to do in the year ahead, because as we're building this list and as I said, this is just getting this initially getting the wheels in motion in your head, because then as we get to the end of this year and we look at what do we really need to finish and we're looking into the year ahead and saying, what do we want to put on our planning, our scheduling, our roadmap for next year? These things are in our head and we've actually spent some time with them. So it's not just like a very simple like a bullet point that we pulled off of somewhere and said, okay, I'm just going to translate this bullet point and I'm going to put this bullet point on my thing next year. It's something we've thought about. So we can say, for example, the JavaScript example I used is I need to know more about JavaScript. So instead of just having a bullet point when you get to the end of the year and say, next year I want to learn JavaScript, you can spend some time thinking about it and think about what were the problems that were solved? What were the projects that you were working on where the JavaScript was used? And think about those a little bit along with I want to learn this so that hopefully by the time you get to planning for next year, you have maybe a couple of projects that you've targeted that you know that those will help you get the right experience or you've spent enough time thinking about it that when you start looking for educational materials, materials or content or tutorials, that you have some extra information around that. So you're not just like searching for learn to use JavaScript. It's more like learn to use JavaScript to write a calendar program or something like that where it's it's got that extra detail. It is essentially we talk about niches all the time from serving others, creating that niche and having that solution. But also when we want to be served, it's nice to know what our niche is. And that's what we're doing here is we're looking at it and we're finding a way to take a big thing and chop away a little bit, refine it, define it down to a niche that now we can go find that person that can support our request, our need and most effectively help us become a better developer in the year ahead. So this is a great thing to do as we're going into the holidays because there's going to be those times where you're just you had too much turkey to eat and you're just hanging out and it's almost nap time and you're just your mind's wandering and stuff like that. These are the kinds of things that's it's actually very beneficial to have them just floating around in your head. Or if you've got a car trip or a plane trip or something like that where you can't be terribly productive. But these kind of things where you can just sort of think through these kinds of topics, it turns it into a great use of that time. That being said, I'm going to let you get back into your week. Hopefully it's not a bad one. Hopefully it's a light one. You got some good times ahead and we've got one more special this week and then we'll get back into our normal stuff. But until that next special, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. There are two things I want to mention to help you get a little further along in your embracing of the content of Develop-a-Noor. One is the book, The Source Code of Happiness. You can find links to it on our page out on the Develop-a-Noor site. You can also find it on Amazon, search for Rob Broadhead or Source Code of Happiness. You can get it on Kindle. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can read it free. A lot of good information there. That'll be a lot easier than trying to dig through all of our past blog posts. The other thing is our mastermind slash mentor group. We meet roughly every other week and this is an opportunity to meet with some other people from a lot of different areas of IT. We have a presentation every time. We talk about some cool tools and features and things that we've come across, things that we've learned, things that you can use to advance your career today. Just shoot us an email at info at Develop-a-Noor.com if you would like more information. Now go out there and have yourself a great one.