Disclaimer: I am not an agile expert nor am I an experienced software developer, so all the information regarding the subjects I’m giving out here is purely based on my experience alone.

In case you don’t know yet, in terms of the software development process, a retrospective is a meeting held by a software development team to review the work being done during a specific period of time. All the teammates would share their opinions with others. It usually contains three groups of opinions: the good, the bad, and (I know, you want it to be the ugly, but sorry) the try.

I’m writing this post just to be a reminder and the result of my own retrospective of everything I can recall from 2019. Some of the things I learned and experienced might deserve their own post. I’ll try to make that happen. :)

The Good

Making a decision

  • There are and will always be some tradeoffs to make every time you need to decide on something. There is no silver bullet nor a swiss army knife solution for every problem. A lot of decisions usually come with a prioritizing issue.
  • Sometimes, some actions need to be taken right away at the moment it is devised. Especially for those procrastinators like me, you’ll be surprised with how much this will help organize your life. This mostly applies to the small actions you usually put them to the “I’ll-do-it-later” list.
  • Some actions can wait for a more clear view of the situation. Most of the time it means you need to do more research on the issue.
  • When making a tough decision, laying out all the options you have and their consequences really helps you make the necessary tradeoffs.

Communicating with people

  • Talking with people whose personality is very different from yours will surprise you with how much you can get to know yourself from them.
  • Communicating is not only about the information you want to convey, but also the feeling you want people to have toward you.

Technical skills

  • Programming skills: Golang, Object Oriented, and Haskell
  • CI/CD: CircleCI
  • Web API protocols: GraphQL (+ prisma + nexus) seems like a better idea than Restful API in many cases.
  • Analytics tools: Amplitude

Others

  • Getting better with managing things in my head alone without using a notebook
  • Learned a lot about relationship
  • Learned how to do a retrospective

The Bad

Self improvement

  • Barely touched academic research
  • Couldn’t finish a single book, read a lot though
    • Design Patterns by GoF
    • Learn you a Haskell …
    • Intelligent Investor
    • Naive Set Theory
    • Godel’s Proof
    • Relational Database
    • …

Work

  • Poorly led a software development team
    • Almost no tests at all
    • Teammates couldn’t keep up with the business and the overall technical progress of the project
    • Cared too less about the business part

Others

  • Didn’t write a single blog post
  • Didn’t finish a single side project

The Try

  • Finish a book every three months
  • Release a blog post/article every two months
  • Finish the side project, please do it
  • Use the notebook more to keep track of short-term plans
  • Use Google Photos and Google Calendar more to organize your life
  • Stay fit for at least three months

There you have it, my 2019 retrospective! If everything is going well with the try, see you in the next post by the end of February.