As all Agile methodologies teach us, the action of looking back and reviewing your progress is an essential part of improvement. As such, I’m going to try and run a simple retrospective for my 2012.
Review
Lets start by reviewing the last year on a timeline. As it’s such a long period I’ll stick with monthly increments and pick out notable events.
January:
– Discovered WebGL and my messing about got picked up by LearningWebGL.com
February:
– Nothing of note 😦
March:
– Attended first GDC Meet a Mentor event
– Started planning the “Devs in the ‘ditch” events
April:
– Organised a successful first “Devs in the ‘ditch” event
– Organised the 7digital stand at the “Find your Ninja” event.
– Attended GeekGirl Meetup in London
May:
– Organised and helped man the 7digital stand at Silicon Milk Roundabout
– Attended the Progressive.Net Tutorials
June:
– Organised second “Devs in the ‘ditch” event
July:
– Became a STEM Ambassador
August:
– Nothing of note 😦
September:
– Organised third “Devs in the ‘ditch” event
– Stepped up to take over the ACCU Mentored Developers from Paul Grenyer and thereby co-opted into the Committee.
– Kicked off an ACCU Mentored Devs book group on JavaScript: The Good Parts
– Attended DDD10
October:
– Organised and presented at the fourth “Devs in the ‘ditch” event.
– Presented the same talk at ACCU London
– Became the API Team Lead Developer
November:
– Took part in a Year 9 Careers Speed Networking event as part of being a STEM Ambassador
– Presented to undergraduates at the Middlesex University IT Careers Forum
– Passed Grade 1 of Cello
December:
– Presented at APIDays 2012 in Paris
Other Stuff:
– Adopted a lovely Cat
– Attended at least 18 events, and spoke at 3.
– Attended 4 Weddings (one of which was a surprise)
– Lost just over 10lbs in weight and no longer officially overweight
– Visited Portugal, twice, and Paris.
– Finished reading 5 books, and started at least twice as many.
– Wrote 12 blog posts
– Created 13 Github Repos
Good / Bad / Change
Now is the part where I reflect on the year, using items that I brought up in my review as an aid and write down what I felt went well, went badly and what I’d like to change going forward.
Good
– Finally started speaking at community events, I’d been wanting to do so for so long, but was afraid
– Attended many events and conferences
– Improved my overall health 🙂
– Began organising events and learned a lot from this
– Began putting myself forward as role model to younger people as part of the STEM Ambassador work
Bad
Change
– Must commit to projects and finish them before starting new ones
– Must commit to finishing reading books that I start before starting new ones
– Try to read more books
– Blog more, it improves writing and communication skills
– Stop procrastinating!
Goals & Actions
Normally the team would vote on which topics they’d like to promote to goals and actions but as it’s just me I’ll pick three that I feel are the most important.
Goal: Make 2013 The Year of Reading
Action: Read and finish at least one book a month. Preferably a technical book but any kind counts. I’ve put the GoodReads Challenge in my sidebar as a reminder.
Goal: Present and speak more.
Action: Volunteer for more events. I did three last year, I’ll aim to improve on that. I’ve already put myself forward for an event with the London Continuous Delivery group in March
Goal: Visit a new country
Action: I’ll make a point this year to take holiday somewhere that I haven’t been before. It doesn’t have to be far, just somewhere new to me.
Retrospective Close
I feel that this was indeed a useful exercise. It took a couple hours to do and write up mostly because a year is a long time period and I wanted to go back through my calender and emails to ensure I picked up as many events as I could.
Looking back I can say that that I’ve both done a lot of things, but also not enough things. I picked up new items such as speaking and becoming more involved in the ACCU, but I also let things slip such as blogging and reading. It’s so easy to let things slip by you when they happen one day at a time.
I’m hoping that 2013 will continue along the trend that I started as there is so much that I want to see. At the end of the year I will run another retrospective and compare it with the actions above, which should be interesting!
Chris O'Dell 