2014 Retrospective

At the end of 2012 I performed a simple Retrospective of the year.  I seem to have neglected to do one at the end of 2013 but it shall be a yearly habit from now on.

Conferences attended:

• PIPELINE 2014 (which I co-organised)
• NorDevCon
• Progressive .Net Tutorials (thanks to @slicedbread_it for generously giving me a ticket they could no longer use)
• DDD East Anglia
• CodeMesh
• NDC London
• Unicom DevOps Summit

Presentations:

• A short presentation at King’s College to undergrad Comp Sci students about a Day in the Life of a Developer at 7digital as part of the Graduate Developer Community’s Meet a Mentor scheme.
• A short presentation at a Geek Girl Meetup Breakfast about the Future of Web APIs
• Presented at NorDevCon 2014. Video available at InfoQ.
• Presented “Evolving from a monolithic to a distributed public API” at London API Group 
• Presented at NDC London
• Presented at Unicom DevOps Summit

Published:

This is a big achievement for me personally.  Thank you to those that made it happen.

• Joint Contributor with Paul Shannon in More Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
• Contributed a chapter to Build Quality In – the collection of Continuous Delivery and DevOps stories edited by Steve Smith and Matthew Skelton

Personal:

• Co-organised my first conference – PIPELINE 2014!
• Went skiing for the first time
• Started Portuguese lessons
• Took Cycling Classes and Bicycle Maintenance classes
• Continued my Cello lessons (aiming for Grade 3 this spring)
• Attempted the Computer Networks Coursera course and achieved a grade of 47%. I’m proud of this score as it was a pretty intense course.
• Stepped down from the ACCU committee as I could no longer devote the proper time to it.
• Only managed to finish reading 6 books when I’d hoped to read 18.
• Donated blood 3 times before being temporarily suspended to investigate anaemia 😦
• Sadly, I still have limited proficiency with the Portuguese language

Changed Jobs

In August I left my role at 7digital, I job and company I loved and spoke about, after 4 years of being with them.  I wanted to try a new challenge.  I know it sounds corny, but I really did.  I wanted to see if I could take all the things I’d learned there to somewhere new, share my knowledfe and learn even more.

I took up a Senior Engineer role at JUST EAT and it’s been great.  I’ve had much to learn and as a result have been battling my own Imposter Syndrome, but I hope I’ve been making a difference, even a small one.

Next Year

I plan to get back on top of my reading, blogging and neglected fitness – the usual stuff.

Having left 7digital in August I now longer feel comfortable presenting about the experience report about their journey towards Continuous Delivery.  Change happens there every day and I am no longer able to ‘finish’ the presentation with details of what is currently being achieved.  There are still many things I could talk about from that time though, possibly distil the learnings into something more transferable, but I believe the audiences enjoyed hearing a real life experience report.

Creating a new presentation is top of the list and I’m open to ideas and suggestions.

Conclusion

Once again I’ve achieved more than I thought – a year is a long time and we regularly fail to remember anything other than recent events.  This feeling has been compounded by my focus in the latter half of the year being centred almost exclusively on my new role at JUST EAT, which is to be expected.  A new role is challenging with a new codebase, domain, terminology and people to learn about, which is exactly what I was seeking, so I’m happy!

Here’s to 2015!