It’s been a fruitful and amazing year.And that means documenting my small journey as a blog post.
Work
New friends and mentors
I joined Boku in September 2021 & had the pleasure to meet some amazing developers and colleagues.
I got the opportunity to learn a lot while on the job, through mentors, environment & infrastructure itself.
Promoted to Software Engineer 2
The title says all and I am grateful for it. Without such an awesome environment, I wouldn’t have faced the challenges, support and mentorship that I did.
Blogging
Migrating my blog from Jekyll to Hugo
I regretted not writing more posts in 2019 even though I had my blog setup on Jekyll . It was not the lack of time that bothered me but more of lack of proper process.
As atomic habits books rightly said to develop a habit ,the habit must be easier to execute.After shifting to Doom Emacs this year to make documentation, it made sense to shift my blog from Jekyll to Hugo(Incoming blog post stay tuned!).
Writing my posts in markdown just for my blog was creating the friction in my writing process. Writing all my posts in .org mode helped me reduced that friction and made my process better.
Also by introducing small Today I learnt concepts (tils) posts helped me further in being consistent in writing. As I wrote about the the things I learnt while working and didn’t need to invest extra time and effort into researching and writing separate posts.
Lessons learnt:
Do one thing at a time
One of the biggest lessons I have learnt this year is not to take on too many projects at once .To focus on one thing and to do that properly. I have realised doing too many things at once , made me rush to one project haphazardly so I could complete the next one . This is reminder to myself to complete a project to a satisfactory stage and then move on.
Document your software process/journey before/while doing it.
Documentation about the work I has always felt like a daunting task to me.But not having proper docs has been more painful.
One of key lessons, I am still learning is to make the document while working on the project. To treat writing as a part of the development process and not as an afterthought. One way I recently realised how to do this is to write the titles and subtitles about dos .This helps in breaking down a big problem into a small one. Example: Im trying to put in place this strategy for blog writing too.
Be organised
I found my old diary of 2013 (when I was still preparing for JEE mains ). It showed me a reflection of how I used to organize content for my studies so why not for learning while working and for blogging?
This is why I made the decision to learn doom Emacs and vim and use org-mode as a part of being organized. There is a steep learning curve in Emacs. I myself have given up many times on Emacs and have come back because of the useful features it provides.
Done is better than perfect
A lesson I learnt the hard way. All the planning and over thinking can do no good if you don’t execute the plan. Just start with an initial plan and start executing it. Putting a little thought into the execution can lead to remarkable results.
What’s next?
Automation of content creation flow
Continuing to refine my blog content creation post workflow, I will explore ways to reach out to wider audience. To do this in such a way that it doesn’t take much mental effort from my side. And to find a way to reduce my time and effort in the proof reading & editing process.(Any advice or suggestions are welcome!)
Getting better at note taking and diagram making
One of the key goals for 2023 is taking the effort to make quick diagrams. I have understood concepts quicker by looking at diagrams than reading blocks of text . But diagram making tends to be a long time consuming task. I am currently trying out draw.io and excalidraw for this purpose ,still at experimental stage tho.
Trying out public speaking or podcast of my learning
While explaining a concept to a friend or colleague helped in finding out the gaps in my learning. Though I tried to explain a concept to myself while learning, I tend to find it awkward or sometimes lazy to re-iterate to explain the concept back to myself. One of my goals is to get better at speaking and hopefully not bore my little audience.
And that’s all for my year end review for 2022 !