Retrospective of 2021. Plans for 2022.

Published: December 29, 2021 / Updated: December 29, 2021 Ihor Hadzera Common, Misc

Well, it’s almost the end of the year and as it has already become a tradition – it’s a good time to look back, analyze this year’s achievements, and create a plan for the next year.

Last year’s retrospective article – Retrospective of 2020. Plans for 2021.

2021’s plans progress

  • Finish the Leading People and Teams Specialization – 100% (cert link)
  • Receive Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert certificate
  • Run at least 100 runs with a minimum of 500km distance and take part in a race – 100%. Due to Strava, I’ve done 100 runs with a total distance of 1040 km.
  • Solve 30 HackerRank problems – 1/30
  • Learn 1 additional programming language – 100% YAML (due to google it is still programming language xD). I improved my skills in that, because of different DevOps projects.
  • Post at least 12 new posts in the blog – 4/12
  • Contribute to at least one open-source project on Github
  • Receive a Professional Scrum Developer certificate
  • Get English certificate (IELTS minimum 6.0 or similar) – postponed for 2023/4 due to changed plans and fact that certificate expires 365 days after the test.
  • Visit at least 2 new countries – 150% (visited 3 new countries I’ve never been to before – Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia)
  • Hike to Gerlach peak
  • Sleep at least 1 night in a tent – 300% (as 3 nights have been spent in a tent 🏕)
  • Donate at least 1.5 liter of blood (3 times) – 100% (1.8 liter – 4 times)
  • Complete First Aid Course
  • Meaningful work-related change – 100% (changed workplace to a place which gives the satisfaction of solving every day’s customer problems)
  • Visit a technical conference or meetup (min 2)
  • Start investing money – 100% (opened a few retirement accounts as well as investing in some stock for shorter-term)
  • Sleep 8+ hours – 85% (do my best to get to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 7 AM at least 5 days a week)
  • Do some crazy adrenaline rush thing (paraglide, glider) – 100% – finished Vienna City Marathon 2021. Nevertheless, the glider is waiting for me in 2022 ;).
  • Do some gym (at least 1 per week or 52 in a year) – 5/52
  • Do skying (3 times+) – 100% (2/3)
  • Add at least 2 new board games to the home collection – 150% (+ 3 new board games in our collection)

Summarise:

  • 51% (12/23) – Fully completed targets
  • 14% (3/23) – Progressed well, but not completed
  • 35% (8/23) – Have not been started or progress is negligible

“Out of targets achievements of 2021”

Except for the main plan with the points above, there are a few things I’ve managed to do and am happy to share with you with:

  1. I’ve run full marathon distance (at Vienna City Marathon 2021 annual race). My target time was 3:50, but reality made my own correctives and after 36’s kilometers I’ve got a painful calf cramp, so last 6 kilometers I most walked rather than ran. The final time was 4:21. Even though, I’m really proud of such achievement, because not the race itself, but rather 3 months of preparation prior to the race day was the most difficult part of a marathon run.
  2. I’ve passed a test for a motorcycle driver’s license and bought my first bike. As it all happened close to end the of the riding season (in Poland it usually starts in March and ends in November), I hope to fully enjoy that since spring of 2022 🏍

Even though 51% is far away from 100%, at the last year’s post I wrote

So achieving >= 50% of goals might be a reasonable approach.

which means “baseline” has been met. Nevertheless, as we all strive to be better in the “New Year”, I decided to raise the baseline to 60% for the next year. This decision affected my approach of creating a to-do list for next year from “let’s put everything see what happen” to creating more precise targets divided by category.

Plans for 2022

Few unfinished, as well as “permanent” targets, have been moved from last, in addition to that, there are few new points:

Health

  1. Do 48 gym sessions (~1 per week)🏋️‍♂️
  2. Run at least 100 runs with a minimum of 600km distance and take part in a race 🏃‍♂️

Professional & Personal Development

  1. Receive AWS Certified Solutions Architect certificate 🔖
  2. Receive a Professional Scrum Product Owner certificate 🔖
  3. Solve 48 HackerRank problems (~ 1 per week) 👨‍💻
  4. Read at least 8 books 📚
  5. Learn at least 1 new programming language or fundamental framework 💻
  6. Have at least 100 “active days” in my GitHub account 👾

Leisure

  1. Hike to Gerlach peak ⛰
  2. Do glider flight ✈️
  3. Visit 1 new country 🏙
  4. Complete First Aid Course ⛑
  5. Add at 1 new board game to the home collection 🎲

Miscellaneous

  1. Post at least 12 new posts in the blog (~ 1 per month) 📄
  2. Donate at least 1.5 liters of blood (3 times) 🩸

Final thoughts

I believe that at the beginning of 2021 all of us had huge expectations for this year. Most of them were related to “back to normality” and the end of the pandemic life mode. As we know now, it was not the case, but today, undoubtedly, we are more informed and prepared for potential pandemic dangers than in the previous year. In the New 2022 year, we need to keep our hope back to normal life, but except hoping, we have to do our best to reach that target. Despite COVID-19, life is moving forward, let’s don’t just focus on bad news, but support each other, focus on our achievements and do regular workouts!

Happy and “Normal” New 2022 Year!

P.S. There are a few highlight photos from 2021. Unfortunately, not every occasion has a photo in place, but at least a few of them could share the mood of my 2021.

Highlight photos from 2021

Job – what is important for you?

Published: February 28, 2021 / Updated: February 28, 2021 Ihor Hadzera Common, Misc
work experience meme

This will be not a technical article, but just a philosophical digression about personal values and preferences. So if this topic is not interesting for you – feel free to skip reading and see you in the next tech post 😉

During my carrier, I changed workplace 4 times (officially more, but in some cases, it was the same company but another location or another company name with the same people in it). Probably 4 times is not a tremendous “switch experience”, but I decided to share my thoughts which I’ve gathered so far.

I remember my first company during my university years, well, at that time I actually didn’t care too much about company values, atmosphere, or vision, the only 1 thing I cared about is getting a production experience. At a point when you have nothing to compare with – everything is great. That how it was in my first company 😉 I was ready to even work for free, just if someone will teach me how to write the software. Now I remember these times with warm nostalgia in my heart.

I believe things changed for me when I switched from my first job (it was a small student company of 10 people in rented apartments in the suburbs area) to a “real” software company of a few thousand employees. During that stage, I learned that you don’t have to put your heater and coffee beans from home to drink a coffee at the workplace, or that it’s not necessary to have an extra sweater in the office, because the heating system could go down at every minute at wintertime.

In addition to benefits, I also found cons of big companies, in my case, it was an absence of feeling that my everyday work at any point important for the good of the company. Every now and then, it was only a tiny task, without an understanding of why it should be done or who will use this feature. For me, such an environment acted as a demotivation and real-life example of the old joke about Soviet Soldier duties – to dig from “here”, till lunchtime.

So after almost 4 years of work in that place, I decided to try work in a small company, which will give a basic level of comfort from one side (good working heating system in winter) and a “sense” of developer work from another. That was a small 25 people company (in fact there were 2 separate companies with the same people) where I’ve spent the next 3 years. During the whole employment time I enjoyed work there because, in a small group, you could make a decision and later see the consequences (good or bad) of that. I believe that there is no better teacher than our own failures and wins. At every point in time, I knew why I do what I do.

Usually, in such companies, you’ll not find a dedicated person for every activity, such as a QA engineer or DevOps. It means that 99% of technical duties are on the developer’s shoulder. There are pros and cons of such a solution.

Good thing is that during DevOps or BA activities you have an opportunity to know the product from a different perspective, which allows solving more complex problems in a more elegant way as well, as creating more accurate estimates.

Bad thing is that sometimes it’s too much. No one could be an expert in all areas, everyone has some kind of accent (for instance DevOps, backend, or frontend development). And from my perspective, such an approach aka “Universal Soldier” creates run-down software with a weak architecture. Every time someone who has to make an important decision on a bunch of topics, could rely only on their own very shallow knowledge in that particular area. E.g. I as a mostly backend developer could create a cloud infrastructure for my software, but for sure it will not be as good as some DevOps solution.

At the end of my second year in that company, I started considering what next? Not in terms of a new place, but what else could I do here to grow as a professional. I tried myself in almost every possible role in that company and it occurred that “start-up like” companies have pretty limited opportunities for employees in terms of growth path. You could like your daily routine, salary, and colleagues, but there is always a pretty low “sealing”, and as soon as you reached that level, you could do nothing but accept that fact.

So on 7th year of my career, I decided to start once again in a big company, but this time I have some experience and a bit more solid understating of what I want and what I don’t want 😉

This article has nothing to learn from, but just a reflection through the prism of my own vision and experience. So please criticize me too much 😜. I believe that set of values is a very unique for everyone and obviously there is no perfect place to work on, but as old idiom says:

The road to excellence is always under construction

Be safe and stay tuned!

Run, Forest, Run!

Published: December 29, 2020 / Updated: December 29, 2020 Ihor Hadzera Misc

Hi you there. This time I decided to share the story how I started running, why it is important and why I’m going to carry on.

Before January 2020, the last time I’d run longer than 100 meters to the bus station was a high school and from my memories, it wasn’t a very enjoyable process (probably because when I was 15 I wanted to do nothing, but just playing video games). Probably everyone had these times at school when the teacher asked you to do something, which was completely outside of the area of your interest.

First time I started considering jogging a year ago, in December 2020. At that time I was up to my ears in work because of very tight deadlines and was spending up to 15 hours daily with the computer. After a week or so, I started to feel annoying pain in my back. I thought that just short breaks during the working days will help, but they didn’t. At that time some gossips started spreading among the people about the new viruses, so I decided to omit gyms and other public places. And you know, after a brief analysis I figured out, that there are not so many things you could do on your own, without very special equipment and with a quick start. I had a few options to choose between: cycling, home workout, yoga, running. For the first option, I didn’t have a good bike, for the next two options – I didn’t have enough willpower to do any physical activities right near my favorite sofa where I used to spend evenings with Netflix, so my choice was running – I had some old snickers and shorts – that was enough for start.

My first run wasn’t at any point fast or long, in addition, it was cold (January 25) and foggy. Probably at that time I made all possible mistakes before the run – wear 3 warm layers of clothes, forgot about warmup, had breakfast right before the running. So if you want to start running, please be smarter than me and read some How-Tos before (example here)

My first “adult” jogging

BUT, after even such failed run, I fell in love with running and it is still true.

So bellow I want to put my personal points, why running rules:

  1. The pain in a back is gone – that was my initial reason to run and after even the first run, I was feeling much better than before. I know, that not because of the miracle power of running, but rather overall physical activity, but for me this activity was running.
  2. That was a big discovery for me, but running helps a lot against daily stress. After full of stress working days, running helps to “refresh the head” and switch the focus to something else (this aspect is certainly very important for me, because there were dozens of times when I was thinking about work for a long time after working hours)
  3. Thanks for running I’ve met new interesting people and improved contact with people I already know. This includes common running events (in a workplace we organize “running Thursdays”, when we do ~5km with colleagues in before lunchtime) as well as some public races (this year I’ve participated in 3 such events and each of them was full of positive emotions and people)
  4. Running helps me to be in a good shape 😉 Well, I’m a pretty skinny guy, but even though I had a few extra kilograms, so after a year of running I did my -10kg (which for sure were extras one).
  5. Last but not least – it helped me do not get out of my mind because of the 2020 year and a half of the year on self-isolation. There were moments (especially in April-May) when everyone had to have a very solid reason to go outside and luckily jogging was one of such reasons (at least in Poland). So especially in times of COVID, running is a very good option.

I’m not a running coach neither a doctor and could not advocate running for everyone, because it also has a lot of cons. But at least for me, running works perfectly and I could recommend it in case you don’t have any contraindications to do so.

The last thing I want to share with you is probably my achievements during 2020 in terms of running. I know they are not gigantic, but it was my first year with running adventures and I will do my best to beat myself next year.

You could also follow my on Strava here.

Stay tuned Guys, Bye

P.S. bellow I will share a few photos from this running year 🙂