Reading various articles about productivity, I have often come across the statement that we should plan our goals. Often it is not only about answering the question: "Where do I see myself in x amount of time?". The fact that we have answered such a question does not give us much yet. What matters more is confronting that answer after some time. The end of the year can be a natural moment for this kind of reflection.

When I started analyzing my progress, I came to the conclusion that I would not practice self-flagellation. It is not that important to me how many planned things I did not achieve. Much more important to me is the point of what I managed to achieve.

The One-Man-Army Problem

I spent the beginning of the year working with Bitnoise. We parted ways in June after less than a year, and I am happy about that parting. I am convinced that moving to Bitnoise under the conditions originally agreed had to end sooner or later. In a way, it was my mistake that I did not say at the beginning what I cared about. Bitnoise is a very nice company, full of positive people and with very competent bosses. However, the projects I landed in were mostly one-person projects, and because of that there was not much opportunity to develop valuable practices such as Code Review. Being honest with myself, I understood that this led to a situation in which I was bored and discouraged. Ultimately, it made me realize that I do not want to work alone in projects. A project is a team, a squad - if there is none, then both the project and the programmers lose.

Looking back, I can see that I positioned myself badly in the cooperation with Bitnoise. It is a great pity that from the very beginning I did not land in one of the larger projects they run.

Quizzes, Quizzes, Next, Quizzes...

At Bitnoise I got to know some technologies that were new to me. The beginning of the year was a continuation of work from the previous year on a mobile game written in the Ionic + Angular stack. Wow, it was a very cool project. My previous adventure with mobile applications usually came down to React Native, so this was quite a new challenge for me. The backend of the application was written in PHP by the client, while the whole frontend depended on me. There were several interesting challenges related to speeding up and smoothing the whole gameplay, or paying back technical debt that had appeared in previous iterations. The project was difficult because I was the fourth independent developer working with this code, and I set myself the goal of making all parts of the application consistent so that they would be more or less equal.

Projects we take over have the feature that many times we are doomed to many different concepts and ideas that were implemented, unfortunately sometimes without a happy ending. Of course, there was always some reason to do something in one way and not another. After time passes, all that remains is reading tea leaves.

In the first quarter of this year, Next also appeared for me and entered quite strongly. At that time I worked on two projects based on this tool. In both cases, the stack was based on NextJS + Contentful + Vercel. I really liked this combination - so much that in the second quarter I decided to build my own website based on it.

A Sad Beginning of the Year

In December 2020, I ended my four-year adventure with Kodilla. I made the decision out of reason, I needed something new. Even so, I was sad - 4 years is a lot of time. I had a plan, however - I wanted to start a solo career - and that was my main goal for this year. In the second quarter, together with Sebastian, we started working on the concept of a new website, where existing and new articles would appear, where there would be a place to promote valuable books, a podcast (sic!), and programming courses.

A Dynamic Start

That is a lot, but this goal definitely drove me throughout the whole year. The first step was starting work on my personal brand. We began by defining what my personal brand is and how it should communicate its position. This was very important to me - at some point I understood that I will not reach everyone and I would not like to work with everyone, but if I clearly present my values, it is possible that I will reach the right target group.

And that is how the new logo was created. The logotype, together with the style guide, served us to design the home page and subsequent views of the new website. In parallel, I started programming, and at this point we already have several subpages completed, which I am currently filling with content and, I hope, will publish already in January 2022. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Individual Mentoring Practice

This point of the program is very important. I managed to find several interested people for whom I became an individual mentor. I am glad that I can help them and develop them toward programming. You already know me well enough to know that this is very important to me - for many reasons.

Despite the pandemic, I managed to return to teaching children. I do not have spectacular successes here, but in 2021 two children worked with me: an 11-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy. I will repeat myself, but programming should be a compulsory subject at school. This field changes the way of thinking and learning that the old-fashioned education system pumps into our heads. It requires a specific approach and understanding of many aspects of the projects being created - not only technical ones.

I hope that in 2022 more young "curious" people will join me. I am thinking quite intensively about starting a Programmer Academy project in my local area, intended specifically for children aged around 11-13.

Professional Projects

The events related to ending cooperation with Bitnoise forced me into serious reflection about who I want to work with and on what terms. The number of offers that were coming to me at that time was very large. From March, I started regularly participating in recruitment processes, looking for a new place for myself. The year 2021 also brought incredible increases in salaries. This meant that most offers were above my financial expectations. So other factors were decisive. Which ones? Team size, its seniority, approach to development, flexibility. The events of the previous months also confirmed my belief that to develop, I need to go deeper into backend technologies. In May I had a small episode with Ruby, but I completely did not feel the spark for learning this language. I know JavaScript reasonably well, so NodeJS would be the natural choice for me, but I thought that it might be too obvious a path. Especially because, by necessity, I had already participated in such projects.

The choice fell on Java. After all, it is the queen of OOP. The project I joined is huge and mostly built on many technologies - JSP, Java Spring, Angular, React, TypeScript, jQuery, and many others. A lot of legacy, but also many possibilities.

Further steps led me toward Enterprise systems. I had already dealt with them in previous years (Magento and Kentico), so I was aware of what this might involve. This is how I got to know Guidewire and Jutro. Have you heard of the Gosu language? It is a mix of Java, C#, and ECMAScript. The language is developed by Guidewire, which de facto invented it and promotes it in its projects. I plan to write a short series about these technologies - because unfortunately there is not much information online, and perhaps it will be useful to someone somewhere in Poland.

Back to the Roots

Train the Trainer - this was the training I attended in the fourth quarter of this year. The training on how to train was organized by Sages. Most of you probably know Sages - it is one of the largest training companies in Poland, organizing workshops at different levels of advancement for the technical industry. The training was really great. It clarified many things for me, pointed out mistakes I made or could make, and gave me many threads to think about.

I decided to return to professional teaching. That is how I started cooperating with Sages. At this moment I am working on the program of a new course and preparing for workshops that I will run in January - for the curious, I will hint that one will concern Next, and the other Angular.

After a one-year break, I also returned to Kodilla. I am glad I decided to take this step. We parted in a friendly atmosphere, with quite good results, and I knew that a possible return would be a formality.

Reading - My Illness

As every year, at the beginning of 2021 I set myself a goal - to read at least 12 books. This year I did not manage to achieve it. As of today, the list for 2021 contains 7 books read and two in progress - probably both will be finished by the end of December.

• Iwona Blecharczyk - Trucking Girl
• Marvel Comics - Annihilation. Volume 1
• Sue Black - All That Remains
• Marcin Wójcik - Celibat. Opowieści o miłości i pożądaniu
• Jonas Jonasson - The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
• Paweł Tkaczyk - Zakamarki marki
• Nick Bilton - American Kingpin
• Marta Niedźwiecka, Hanna Rydlewska - Slow Sex. Uwolnij miłość (in progress)
• Frank Herbert - Dune. Volume I (in progress)

As you can notice, the items on the list above are very different, but mostly this is literature I read for entertainment. For the new year I already have several interesting titles - which ones? You will probably find out in the coming months.

Podcasts

I would be unfair if I did not add a few podcasts to the list above. This year I often chose a podcast instead of a book. Listening to shows became quite a nice form of entertainment.

• Za Rubieżą. Historia i polityka - Miłosz Szymański
• Piątki po deployu - Mateusz Anioła, Miłosz Kusiciel
• Kwadrans na angielski - Szymon Marciniak
• Porozmawiajmy o IT - Krzysztof Kempiński
• Nowoczesna Sprzedaż i Marketing - Szymon Negacz

There was more of it, but these gave me the most joy this year and a solid dose of knowledge. Check them out, perhaps the topic and format will suit you too.

Radość z Uśmiechu

I have been connected with the Radość z Uśmiechu Foundation almost from the beginning of its existence. I created the website, integrated payment systems, and created the mechanism for supporting children. The Foundation's board was always open to my ideas. I am very happy about that and proud of the amount of work I put into developing this project.

However, my cooperation with the Foundation is not only work for them. I help myself as well. This year I participated in the Bieg dla Sióstr campaign, where funds were collected for girls under the foundation's care. For Christmas, I also sent a package with food products for people in need and prepared an individual gift for Zosia (one of the children under their care). I hope she will unwrap the gift soon and that it will bring her a lot of joy. Besides that, I joined an action promoting reading among children, thanks to which another child under the foundation's care, Wiktoria, received several little books.

I know it is not much, but I am very proud of these actions, and they gave me a lot of joy and smiles. I will definitely want to develop this help and perhaps also involve my audience in helping.

Worth reading on this topic

Radek Kotarski

Inaczej. Jak pracować mniej, ale lepiej i przyjemniej

New Year

In 2022 I have several ambitious things to handle. Above all, I would like the new website to launch in the first quarter. Since the site will already exist, I would like to impose more discipline on myself regarding the content I create. In 2022 I would like at least 12 technical articles at different levels of advancement, at least 6 episodes of the Start w IT podcast, and 6 book reviews to be created. This gives us, I hope valuable, 2 materials per month.

I will put strong emphasis on further learning Java and Gosu. In the latter case, especially its implementation.

I also cannot forget about frontend - after all, it is my cradle. Fortunately, React does not let us forget about itself and continues to develop dynamically.

When it comes to reading - I think 12 books per year is a good idea, even though this year there were slightly fewer of them.

Summary

Am I satisfied with myself? I am. I took many actions that were really important to me. The events of 2021 allowed me to understand my position on the market and declare my expectations from work and life more directly.

There are things that did not go the way I wanted, but in the final balance everything came out positive. The most important thing is to push your cart forward. Building my own personal brand and continuing programming development are the two most important professional goals for 2022.

In this summary I skipped the sphere that is most important to me: family. You have to take my word for it - everything is good there. Fortunately.

PS I encourage everyone to make this kind of summary for themselves. The form is of course up to you, but such a quick review of the past year can be really valuable and provide a lot of material for analysis.