Reflective Post | Details

Posted on 2023-02-06

About

Here goes another round. I have changed some of the questions and the format to more of a q&a.

Reflections

Q1

Do you ever ask questions about what you need to do at work?

I ask questions all the time, but for the moment I think it's mostly due to changing teams in November. I think there might still be some things I am unsure about regarding the off-boarding from the previous team, but we are still going through that process as well.

Q2

What training did you participate in this year? In what ways was it helpful?

I participated in more of the Clean Coders exercises (cleancoders.com) which has helped me to keep my self-discipline sharp.

I also do my best to keep up with the profession in terms of reading research articles and participating in the free software/open source community.

Q3

During the past year, what parts of your work gave you the most satisfaction? What have you found challenging?

I enjoy bringing software projects up to best practices. Sometimes I get to work on my own with iterations of improvement, but other times I get to work on an existing project.

The most challenging parts, especially from this past year, have come from working on projects where the project has no conventional way to collaborate with the developers on the source. Many vendor products that provide source code suffer from this. So it becomes a question how to make the least changes possible rather than the best changes.

Q4

What would help you to work more collaboratively in your work environment?

After having changed teams in November, I can already tell that working with on a team of peers that actively and regularly reviews code and cross trains on duties is a net gain.

On a very high level, generally, I also think a more open stack would help. I have never really been a fan of the term itself "full stack" and this is not necessarily an endorsement of AWS: Having changed teams so many times (whether de facto or de jure) over the last five years, there's an observable difference in productivity when it comes to full stack autonomy. I don't think this excludes specialization, it's more about cohesive development within a team. That was the reason why Amazon developed AWS, was the promote their internal developers. And then it got mature enough they offered it to the public. So aside from billing, network security, and DNS, the rest is just computation. I think the workplace could learn a lot from this, other than just becoming a customer. And this could also be achieved w/o a cloud platform, so AWS isn't required. For me this would include a standard for full stack development because at the moment it varies from team to team, server to server, and in some cases, person to person.

Q5

When you need direction or information, are you able to get the help you need?

For the most part my new team always has the answer. And for times when they do not, we have worked together to fill in those gaps, which I think probably have only occurred because of turnover.

Q6

Are there aspects to the job you feel you need to work on? How can you improve?

At this time I feel like I am still in the transition phase for joining the new team. I will probably have more to say about this next year.

Q7

What goals and objectives do you have for your job or for future development for the coming year?

As I have said previously, I still plan on eventually re-pursuing a PhD in computer science, once things settle down a bit. The last few have been very atypical years. Regardless of formal education, I plan on continuing to expand my knowledge to improve the quality of my work and hopefully make it easier.