Retrospect: First Half of 2022

What I did in the past six months

  • Work
    • Set up minimum Ops (build automation, data pipeline) to focus solely on client development

    • Changing wheels on a moving train

      Changing wheels on a moving train

  • Career
    • Development team grew from 2 → 4 members
    • Indie dev team developer community
  • Life
    • Group Pilates twice a week

    • Explored restaurants whenever I had time

      Polle welcome gift

  • Read
    • Effective Engineer
    • High school math again
    • Algorithm for problem-solving skills
    • Mostly beta-reading since I didn’t have mental bandwidth for books

Am I following through on what went well in my last retrospective?

  • Taking interest in other positions’ work
    • Being a small team, I understand most of the work
  • Understanding and participating in company-wide issues
    • Sometimes too busy to attend next sprint meetings
  • Not much done well

Have I improved on what didn’t go well in my last retrospective?

  • Didn’t design a career path at all
    • Still a mess ㅠㅠ
  • Poor focus and choices
    • Used GTD methodology to classify tickets and process work
    • But planning side had different priorities, causing issues
  • Just doing assigned work
    • Proactively researching materials needed for decision-making
  • Poor self-development
    • A mess ㅜㅜ
  • Neglected exercise
    • Started group Pilates twice a week
    • Walking around while playing Pokémon GO
  • Should have updated resume and career portfolio frequently even without changing jobs
    • Updated resume once
  • Couldn’t introduce various processes (Linter, automated testing, dockerized build)
    • Linter needs research since everyone uses different IDEs (VS, VSC, Rider)
    • Only planned dockerized build followed by GitHub Actions
  • Didn’t have good collaboration system
    • Communication with other teams via Trello, within dev team via GitHub PR code reviews

So what will I continue doing?

  • Consistent exercise
  • Updating career portfolio and resume
    • This blog is also my resume
  • Effort for process improvement
    • With more team members, let’s share the load

So what’s the problem?

  • Work isn’t progressing

    Time thief

  • Only read development and self-development books (lacking culture/arts)
  • Velocity keeps dropping from repeating Sprints

So what will I do?

  • Recognize this is long-distance development, not short-distance, and lower the dev team’s speed and goals
    • Increase hobbies
    • Xbox Game Pass?
  • As the team grows, effort to establish work processes
    • Use Trello better or create a unified tool with GitHub
    • Reduce work happening outside tools
  • Read diverse books
    • Join a book club
    • Subscription services like Millie’s Library
  • Make exercise a hobby beyond survival
    • Use services like Frip
    • Solo activities like archery or cycling
  • Can’t do much about career path. Just do my best where I am without regrets.
  • Let’s try the 3 big developer lies

3 big developer lies