My 2016 Accomplishments: What did I work on, What did I learn, and What did I accomplish?
New Skills
I had never written a line of code. I now lead a team and hired 4 Java contractors, 3 of which could easily become employees, and am a key contributor to my teams’ code base.
I had never checked in code. I now lead code reviews for my team, write a GitHub hosted blog, and teach others how to use GitHub.
I had never created a JAVA program. I have written my platforms’ search service, all but 2 ingestion methods, a template-service, revised all of the code automation, and teach experienced team members my methods. Also have become fluent in the Spring architecture and the benefits it offers.
I had never written a unit test. I learned Mockito, Junit, and the Spock framework. I am fluent in Spock unit tests and write them on all code bases. I have also recently learned how to write integration tests to become a test driven developer.
I had never written a Groovy program. I have now learned and rewrote my team’s Jenkins DSL in complete Groovy syntax which also required to learn the Jenkins DSL. I also write all Spock unit tests and integration tests using Groovy.
I have never stood up an architecture. I have now stood up, architected (based on pervious design), and iterated on by incorporating my own architecture which is driving the future of my team’s product.
I have never used Elasticsearch, Logstash, or Kibana. I have learned to use Elasticsearch’s REST APIs, Elasticsearch’s JAVA API, written several Logstash filters, and turned the Logstash data into decision driving/critical product Kibana dashboards for my team. I am viewed as a key Elasticsearch team member on my team and have created an internal HipChat Elasticsearch room which I actively contribute too.
I have used Jenkins to automate jobs before however I have never used Jenkin’s DSL language before. I have created our team’s Jenkins platform in 2 days compared to 2 other dedicated DevOps team members that took 2+ weeks. This also included an automated Logstash job log parser.
I spent 9 months as a MicroStrategy Architect. I have since taught my company’s MicroStrategy Architects about the MicroStrategy JAVA APIs and contributed to MicroStrategy open forum conversations pertaining to the JAVA APIs.
I have led technical review conversations pertaining to all aspects of the code base for my project.
I have written 2 products for my company on my free time in an effort to learn new technology. One was called Answer-Bot, a natural language instant answer Business Intelligence tool. The other, an abbreviation-service used to generate natural language from standard abbreviations.
New Development
I had never led a team. I was trained and led my team for 6 months as Scrum Master and was a fully dedicated Engineer.
I am acknowledged as the Technical lead for my team’s project and have the respect of all team members.
I have lead my team in innovation ideas and generated a positive, fun, and successful environment where people are motivated to deliver while learning.
I have lead my personal development investing in new technology and finding lead edge tech to bring to my team.
I have influenced non-technical peers to learn to code and motivate them to drive for results in other ways.
Where I want to go in 2017
I want to be a Software Architect/Software Engineer, driving the direction of the team while still delivering on a life changing product.
I want to contribute to open source projects and deliver an open source product of my own.
I want to earn the respect of my peers through the code I write and how I motivate them to be better at what they do.
I want to teach others what I did to be successful and how I did it.
