A year in review - 123dev #52

It was not an easy year for many reasons. I have hopes 2022 will be better or at least we’ll find better ways to cope with the constant dread that engulfs us.

At the end of every year I read or delete my pocket queue. I highly recommend it. It feels really good to start the year without all the baggage of the things you wanted to read but never prioritized.

The same goes for things you wanted to learn. All those frameworks and languages you haven’t needed probably don’t matter that much. Take some time to push yourself to new things in 2022 instead of feeling guilt over the things you didn’t do in 2021.

It doesn’t matter if you learned to program this year, if you switched careers, or you chose to be a nicer person. You survived the past 2 years and that’s a big accomplishment. I hope you have a wonderful holiday and new year and hope you success on your goals for 2022.

As for me, I’m looking forward to helping more people be better versions of themselves. I have lots of goals to create new content to reach more people and to dive deep in some areas of tech to understand them more deeply.

I wrote up a full blog post of some things I learned publishing this newsletter every week for an entire year. I know lots of other people started, or wanted to start, newsletters so I hope you find this useful and help you focus on some of the things that I’ve found matter.

I’ve been recording videos of resume reviews for over a month for lots of people looking for tech roles. Last week I had the idea to ask if I could post some of the reviews so more people could learn about good resume practices.

Here’s a video of one of the reviews with more scheduled to be posted on my YouTube channel over the next month.

If you haven’t been keeping a brag doc I highly recommend you start in 2022. It’s not a place to record all of your tasks. Rather it’s a place for you to promote the things you had significant impact on, were proud of, or good feedback you received along the way.

I have a 2 hour calendar appointment on my calendar that repeats every 3rd Wednesday every 3rd month. This means I’ll fill out my brag doc 4 times a year and it’s on my calendar so I won’t forget. Doing it quarterly I have found gives me enough granularity to not forget things but still focus on bigger accomplishments.

At the end of the year I clean up the doc and share it with my manager. It gives me a starting point to talk about career goals, accomplishments, and promotions.