2024 Year in Review
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings and the first issue of 2025!
I hope you had a great end-of-year and spent time with your loved ones. While the family was here, we did a bunch of cool things.
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Things I enjoyed in the last year
Pentax 17: This camera reinvigorated my love for photography. It lowered the stakes for taking pictures, and I have used it for about five rolls. Due to its half-frame nature, it feels as if you're shooting forever.
Pexar digital frame: I saw a bunch of ads for this picture frame, and it's pretty good. I can send pictures over Wi-Fi, which makes it super easy to rotate the available images.
We Go to the Park Picture Book: This is a cool picture book about going to the park. While short, it's a fantastic meditation on life, mainly because I love the concept of third spaces.
Things I Learned in the last year
This past year had ebbs and flows, which was very odd compared to 2023 and all the pandemic years, which felt like a giant blob of life.
2024 was the year when I intentionally chose to lean into more "management" tasks from a staff engineer perspective over more "tech lead" tasks. So, I provided more coverage and support to others and projects from other units, like migrations or upgrades.
As with other years, some lessons stood out for me in the past year (without any particular order):
Any decision is better than no decision.
Keep momentum going
Empowering others to take action
In a healthy team, everyone wants you to succeed
Any Decision is better than No Decision
I realized this during a conversation with managers, during which we were "blocked" because nobody wanted to make the wrong choice.
Instead of trying to decide via committee, I pushed for a choice to be made and took responsibility for it. That unblocked the project, and we had continuous progress for the rest of it. Another instance was that we were not choosing between two viable options because we couldn't fully summarize them into numbers.
Keep Momentum Going
One of my first mistakes during the year was separating myself from the responsibility of shipping a project.
In practice, this meant that the project sometimes lost momentum because I was not keeping up with the involved teams to notice when a blocker was approaching. Other times, projects managed by others lost momentum, and I was asked to unblock them. In some of these, a team prioritized another task (or an urgent bug) over the project, which derailed the calendar because the project was planned in one delivery after another.
Empowering Others to Take Action
I started my intentional practice of mentorship last year, and I've had two to three regular people I mentor or coach. This year, I took more initiative to empower others to act.
Due to my role, many people reach out to me to raise issues they see or have with the organization, a process, or a tool. I've been pushing some people to propose a solution, help them make a plan, meet with leadership, and follow through. Honestly, it's been hard for me to keep a "safe distance" while helping these people; I neither want to take over nor make it seem like it's my issue.
Everyone wants you to succeed.
This probably applies to healthy teams, but this past year, there were moments when I felt overwhelmed by the number of projects I tried to tackle.
Some people reached out during those moments and offered to take things off my plate. I took their word and deeply appreciated it; other times, I took things off their plate, which made me realize that everyone wants you to succeed on a healthy team. Even if they can't take stuff off your plate, they want to help you!
I want everyone to feel supported, so I hope your current team is supportive!
Things I wanted to do but failed
On the flip side of my learning, I failed to achieve some of my goals at work. I tried to tackle some of these tasks but couldn't due to a lack of time. So maybe the encompassing learning is that I should not tackle so many projects simultaneously.
Successfully delegate large projects.
Document the whole world.
Setup an intentional architecture process
Successfully delegating large projects.
I couldn't do this effectively, while I tried a few teams to have managers assign a "feature lead" for projects. Our current structure is conducive to teams splitting work and then reconvene every so often. She needs someone to be on top of the teams besides being a lead.
Document the whole world.
This task was daunting, so I decided to document as much of the current processes as possible. I wanted to take a snapshot of our current situation. This was pretty much impossible without breaking it down further, which I've done, but it was too late in the year to accomplish something meaningful.
Setup an intentional architecture process
This was inspired by my failure to delegate projects successfully and reading Facilitating Software Architecture: Empowering Teams to Make Architectural Decisions.
While teams are empowered to make decisions, in some cases, these decisions are short-term solutions to problems, and we've had to review and redo past solutions in other cases.
Your turn!
As you can see, every other year brings many learnings and failures. While some things remain the same, we're never the same! Let me know how your year went by replying to this email or reaching out via social media.
Happy coding!
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