Hello! I'm Daniel and I'm a Tech Lead, Senior React Native Developer, and content creator. Last week I decided to create a summary of 2022. I used the End of Year Retrospective Template by Pat Kua. You can read all my findings below.
My biggest Source of Inspiration - Books
One of my goals this year was to read books. I found a lot of great books to read and read a lot of chapters from them. It was a great source of inspiration.
I learned many things about Writing, Software Engineering practices, and Technical Documentation.
My Favorite Tool - Notion
I didn’t realize that it’s a free tool, but when I found out, I immediately decided to try it out. It allows the creation of dashboards and nested pages, which is a great tool to create a single source of truth for all my notes. Before I used Apple Notes, Google Docs, and a Journaling app. Now I have everything in one place and it’s easy to find what I’m looking for.
That’s not all that Notion is offering - Templates are a powerful thing that I use a lot to manage my content creation process.
I also like the To Do list option, which allows setting deadlines with reminders. Other apps offer the same option, but only if you pay a subscription.
My Biggest Mindset Shift - Twitter
I was always unconvinced about publishing on social media. I guess it was an impostor syndrome and finding content that was low in quality. I decided to give it a try and now I’m publishing tweets regularly for two months already. I met amazing people, learned a lot of things, and received wonderful feedback which helped improve my blog post drafts.
My Dream Followed - Blogging
I started consuming more and more content about leadership, and then I decided to give it a try and write my own. It was a lot of fun.
I have a history as a blogger. In 2017 I was blogging about JavaScript and Functional Programming. Throughout the years I also wrote a few blog posts about React Native. Some of them got popular.
This year I decided to finally kick off my blog and start publishing my own content. I managed to build a blog with 11ty, and learnt a lot about SEO. I also improved my writing a lot. Take a look at my blog.
My Best Habit - Journaling
I started journaling in 2021, but 2022 was the first year when I did that in a more regular matter. I was sharing some of my frustrations. I also did some self-reflections which helped me tweak my goals and come up with some realizations about my strengths.
The best part of journaling was the content for the end-of-year retrospective. Creating a year summary was easy with all the data gathered.
My Best Decision - Switching Focus From Coding
With the first signs of feeling burned out, I decided to stop growth focused on software engineering. I decided to do something else instead.
It was a great time when I focused on playing guitar and learning music theory. I also played on the console and designed my smart home. This time allowed me to recharge and come back with even more motivation than before.
One of the goals for next year should be to go back to playing guitar again.
My Best Growth Activities - Workshops
I was taking part in every Leadership learning initiative in my company, and I learned a lot from the workshops.
Creating a promotion packet was also a game changer for me because I managed to emphasize my accomplishments and it gave me new opportunities. The template I used for my promotion packet was from the StaffEng blog by Will Larson.
This year I was mentoring even more people and networking. It allowed me to create new relations, and learn a few things. If you want to know what I learned when introducing new developers to projects, take a look at my post - Improve Team Experience with Developer Onboarding Documentation.
Goals for the Next Year
My Goal for next year will be to share even more advice about leadership, soft skills, software engineering, and technical writing on my blog.
I will be posting even more content on Twitter. The plan is to also repost the content on Mastodon and Tumblr, as the future of Twitter is not yet clear.