Recap for 2018

As is my tradition it is time to review 2018 and see how my year unfolded. The first thing that I always do is review my themes for the year and see how many of them I hit.

In general 2018 was an interesting year. The year started out with me on vacation. When I was on vacation I realized that I would have to change jobs in 2018 and luckily it all worked out for the better. I can say making that move was one of the best decisions I have made in my career. The difference between the first half of 2018 and the last half was a study in extreme opposites on the career front. Probably the biggest takeaway from that whole situation is that company culture may be the most important thing when it comes to choosing a position.

Without further delay here is how I did for 2018:

Health

I didn’t drop as much weight as I had hoped to at the start of the year. I think I lost 20 pounds in the first quarter and kind of slacked off after that. There will be another push for that again this year as I always like to start Q1 as a quarter to fast since Q4 for me is a quarter to feast. I haven’t figured out what approach I Am going to take? In the past I have done the Primal Prescription, Slow Carb, and Intermittent Fasting / Time Restricted Feeding. I will consider what approach I am going to take over the upcoming days. I also did DNAFit this year so it would be good to try to incorporate their diet ideas for my specific genes in whatever I decide to do. I should also push for more regular activity, so maybe in the end I will need to break down and get an apple watch just to use the data to drive accountability for myself. Not sure yet I have been holding out for it to do more than it currently does before I take the plunge. I do like that the series 4 at least has a larger display.

I suspect 2019 will involve more public speaking for me based on how things are looking so I also want get healthier for that as it is nice to look good if you are on a stage or the center of attention.

More Blogging

This theme was an epic fail. As I check my posts not counting this post there were a paltry 13 blog posts this year. Barely an average of 1 per month (vs my goal of 52 in general). This one I don’t even mind missing this year because it was for a good reason. I had so much stuff to learn for my new job this was one of the easiest things to cut to get more time. As I have settled in I hope to do better this year, but in general if I am pushing for a sprint deadline this is an easy thing to cut so I can get more code across the line. Once we get our product to market I hope to be able to plan more reasonable sprints.

Learning

I nailed this theme. It has been a great year for learning. Instead of the learning being books I read it has been practical things. First I learned Go Lang and implemented a micro serviced base architecture in it. I am still doing a lot of learning in Go. I haven’t yet figured out really the ideal patterns yet. One thing that I miss from Spring is how opinionated the framework is. There is a remarkable amount of consistency in code when you have the strongly defined stereotypes like that. When you see Go on the internet it is all over the place. Sometimes it feels like node code, sometimes it feels like C code, but it never really feels like people are using the same consistent patterns. I have played around with sort of the controller / service / repository layers and not sure that is the correct idiom. I have played around with just general event handlers and middleware patterns. I think this year will still be me trying to figure out what is the best patterns to use for backend services.

On the business front there was also a lot of learning for me. For the first time in my career I built an agile process that our team uses, and got a brand new team that didn’t know each other at the start off to a very good working cadence. Our process has worked so well that other parts of the organization have adopted it as their baseline and started iterating on it to adapt it to their teams. I have also applied some of the things I learned from domain driven development to build a model that allows the business and the technology teams to communicate with the same language.

Architectural Changes

This was underway when I left my previous company. We managed to convert some of our apps to Java from Groovy. We were doing this on a piece by piece basis at first going after the easy parts. We were also doing some restructuring to address some performance problems in the architecture around the time of my departure. This I would probably only give 50% to. Had I remained in that role I am sure we would have made major changes by the end of the year, but the organization had become too political for me and I got the opportunity of a lifetime at the same time.

Conclusion

All in all 2018 was another great year. The year ended much stronger than it started and I feel like I had a lot of personal growth this year. Looking forward to 2019 it is going to be a huge year for our company and for me personally.