Skip to main content

My 2022 Review

2022 was completely a mind-blowing year for me. Lots of changes happened at work. At present, things seem to be going to settle down, I want to look back at my year.

My balcony (2022)

Q1

At beginning of the year, I started with Metaverse and NFT research. I completed my first course about a new technology Blockchain on brilliant[dot]com which became my best favorite learning platform later on. Getting a certified IBM developer certification was also a good experience. I gained more knowledge of technologies including containerization, microservices, DevOps, and Cloud-Native. It triggered me to plan for DevOps toolchain enhancement for the company. Adopting GitOps practice was a good start. It is one of my main focuses for my position role as a Tech Lead. I was really impressed by the book “The Brief History of Time”. The story of Stephen Hawking was so inspiring. To me, it was one of my favorite books of this year. Sadly, this period was the time when some of my good friends were leaving the company.

Q2

Changing the organizational process was so truly difficult. Lots of discussions have been conducted to have the same voice for a group of people since the new role Engineering Lead was proposed for the change. What I experienced well in this period was that whenever I put my energy into something, all related things will come around me. And, franking is the only medicine to treat toxic sicknesses and environments. I started to sharpen my English pronunciation skills with ELSA speak app. I also spent time reading human management-related books including “The Mythical Man-Month” and “Peopleware”. I also spent a month interviewing for a new role as an Engineering Manager in a startup.

Q3

The role of Engineering Lead was adopted well. Working with completely new teams with new projects was an excellent experience. I have learned to work with new people who don’t have the same mindset as me. As a leader of the new teams, I understand more about the effortless approach to leading people. Getting the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) certificate helped me set up my working style as a Scrum Master with new teams. I affirmed that I should not be a hero but rather that I need to give more authority to the team to be self-organized.

Q4

Still, there were many things happened unanticipatedly. Another good member was leaving the company. It was the first time I joined team HR to define a process of annual performance appraisal. It took a huge time and effort. Some new practices were officially applied as a company standard such as Engineering Levels, OKRs, and the role of Team Lead. I also have experience with leading some development teams working on different projects built with different technologies. Giving clarity of the projects' roadmap for developers was my important job. Moreover, I have learned along with teams to solve different emerging project issues.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

Generating PDF/A From HTML in Meteor

My live-chat app was a folk of project Rocket.Chat which was built with Meteor. The app had a feature that administrative users were able to export the conversations into PDF files. And, they wanted to archive these files for a long time. I happened to know that PDF/A documents were good for this purpose. It was really frustrated to find a solution with free libraries. Actually, it took me more than two weeks to find a possible approach. TL, DR; Using Puppeteer to generate a normal PDF and using PDFBox to load and converting the generated PDF into PDF/A compliance. What is PDF/A? Here is a definition from Wikipedia: PDF/A  is an  ISO -standardized version of the  Portable Document Format  (PDF) specialized for use in the  archiving  and long-term  preservation  of  electronic documents . PDF/A differs from PDF by prohibiting features unsuitable for long-term archiving, such as  font  linking (as opposed to  font em...

[Snippet] Generate a new unique "name" string from an existing list

Suppose that we have a list of employees. Everytime, we want to add new employee into this list, the name of the employee will be generated with the following rules: - the name of the new one is set to " [originalname] 1 " - in case the name already exist, " [originalname] 2 " is used, and so on. Here is my code snippet by Javascript: var employees =[ {id: 1, name: 'name'}, {id: 2, name: 'name 1'}, {id: 3, name: 'name 2'}, {id: 5, name: 'name 4'} ]; var commonUtils = { isExistName: function(_name, _collection, _prop) { for(var i = 0; i< _collection.length; i++){ if(_collection[i][_prop].localeCompare(_name)==0){ return true; } } return false; }, generateNewName: function(_name, _collection, _prop){ var i = 1; var searching = true; while (searching) { var newName = _name+ " " + i; if (!this.isExistName(newName, _collection, _pro...

Retrospective with Sailboat

Have you ever got bored with the Retrospective meeting? I have, sometime. Most of the times, this meeting just goes traditionally by answering three questions: "What good things have we done? What bad things have we done? And, what actions should we improve?" Ever and ever again! My team found a way to make it a little bit more exciting. The idea is that each member - not only our Scrum Master - will become a host. If a meeting is hosted by a memeber, the next meeting will be hold by another one. Yeah, I used "Sailboat" pattern in my turn. So, I just want to share with you guys how it was. I started the meeting by telling a short story that I hoped everyone in my team could recall the meaning behind of Retrospective meetings: There is a group of people trying pick up trash in a park. At the first look, the park seem not to have a lot of trash because they are spread out all over the place. However, these people continuously found trash when they sta...