2021: A career review

Continuing the tradition I started last year (29 days late).

Milestones and noteworthy moments:

1. Finally started giving showcases to clients.
   Despite being in a project which follows Agile Methodology for a year I had not yet had the opportunity. I have now done it several times, and been almost always appreciated. And yet, the stage fright makes me reluctant on the next occasion.

2. Gave 4 talks in 4 months.
   I improved on the streak from the previous year, and made myself even more comfortable with giving talks than ever before. But I still have a long way to go before I feel truly at ease on stage (virtual or otherwise). By the time I had given 3 talks I had wanted to take the rest of the year off from the palpitating pressure of doing any more.

3. Became obsessed with work in the beginning of the year.
   I worked in 3 teams simultaneously for the first 3 months. I don’t know if it was because I wanted to ride the high of recent good reviews, or because I was using work as a welcome distraction from dealing with personal problems. Probably both. I worked for at least 11 hours on weekdays and prepped for the next week on weekends. There wasn't a moment for aimless thoughts.

4. Had a performance review that was akin to a therapy session.
   The review I had in February with the Office Principal(OP), People Champion(PC) and my mentors will probably never happen again, since Thoughtworks is expanding rapidly and formalising procedures. It involved me talking freely about my journey over the last 1.2 years, my mentors saying nice things about me, and concluding with the OP and PC giving advice on how to carry on in the future. There was no judgement, or even a business-like agenda to the meeting. I left the meeting feeling lighter and happier.

5. Started conducting interviews.
   Being an interviewer is a position of privilege and power. It has to be treated very carefully, as you hold another person’s career in your hands in that moment. It’s also about trust from the company, as your decision could make the difference between a mediocre and a star employee being hired that could have ripple effects years into the future.
   Listening to the candidates talk about their work and projects also expanded my own knowledge. I loved doing it, despite it taking a lot of energy to listen carefully and ask calibrated questions for 1.5 hours.

6. Became a mentor and 'catalyst' to several people.
   Again, a privilege and an honour. To put things in perspective, there was a time when I used to introduce myself to senior developers with "I'm sorry, I don't have a Computer Science background. Could you tell me what to do?". And now I give advice like I actually have something worthwhile to say. Surreal.
   I have wondered many times though, if I had done enough to help my mentees, or if I could have done more. They themselves might not know the full answer to that question. How can one tell? How does one distinguish between a person who wants to try things on their own versus a person who does not want to be a burden by asking for more help?

7. Became obsessed with improving efficiency of my team in the middle of the year.
   The '1% improvement everyday' idea had taken a hold on me. I was constantly looking for the smallest adjustments not just in our codebase, but in our team as well. For example:

   • Learnings were to be shared with everyone so that no one is reinventing the wheel.
   • Speed feedback sessions to find everyone's blind spots.
   • Creating docs for standard procedures so that no one wastes time asking how to do something twice.
   • Command aliases that automated several steps in our daily work.

8. Acted as a shadow trainer.
   Yet some more luck, where I was named a shadow trainer for a workshop because all the student slots had already been taken up. This lead to opportunities where I could’ve become a permanent trainer as well.

9. Wrote an article after ages
   My Ambition Has Evolved Beyond Being a Technical Expert

10. Learnt a little Golang and made my first steps towards being a full stack dev.
    Worked on a couple of Stories, some refactoring, and fixed bugs. This has been a very important step towards me becoming a full stack developer, and making me more eligible to be a Tech Lead in the future. My own Tech Lead has been incredibly patient - he walked me through the solutions himself instead of pairing me off with another developer.

11. IPO.
    I was in the right place at the right time with the Thoughtworks IPO. Being part of an IPO was a bucket list item, and I had never expected it to be fulfilled so soon.

12. Temporary co-Tech Lead.
    A teammate and I were made temporary co-TLs of our team for 3 weeks. The word 'privilege' is starting to lose meaning by now. It was a massive learning curve, and one I need to work more on - particularly context switching.
    
    

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Notable firsts:

1. Worked as a judge in a competition (Technovation Girls).
2. Became a mentor.
3. Gave 4 talks in a year.
4. Conducted interviews, and learnt to anchor them.
5. Worked on backend tasks again for the first time in 6 years.
6. Named temporary co-Tech Lead.

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New things learnt:

1. Add git hooks to a project, using husky.
2. Configuring prettier and eslint config files.
3. Dealing with env variables and processes using NodeJS.
4. Learnt how to make the console pretty with NodeJS.
5. git stash (in depth), recursive modules and general commands in depth (link)
6. Docker (re-learnt it after forgetting much of what I learnt last year). Made extensive notes on it (link)
7. Integration of Google Forms, Google Sheets, App Scripts, and email automation.
8. Redux.
9. Using burp suite to monitor network calls in an Android emulator.
10. React Native localisation.
11. Background tasks in React Native.
12. Golang (basics)
13. Bash (basics)
14. Vim (basics)
15. Python (relearnt after losing touch).
16. Jupyter, Pandas and matplotlib.
17. Contract testing.

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Reflections:

1. Your career (and your life) is the sum of luck, interacting with the right people, grabbing opportunities, and grinding out results. And the compounding of all of these over time. I realised it the most this year because of examples such as these:

   • Working with a Tech Lead who not only is monumentally knowledgeable, but also gives many opportunities to his team members to shine.
   • Working in a company that heavily emphasises on giving feedback, so that everyone is feeling good and self aware throughout the year.
   • Working with a lot of smart people makes you look good too.
   • Saying yes to one minor opportunity in the beginning of the year lead to my name being heard among some of the biggest folk in the company by the end of the year.
   • My performance review was coincidentally postponed to after getting a word of praise from a client. So I knew in advance my review would go well.

2. Ironically, despite being a mere spectator to much of the success that you get, you still won’t get much success if you don’t work hard when it matters.

3. The power of saying yes to opportunities.
   It lead to one benefit after another. Joining a volunteer group led me to learning about Google App Scripts and email automation. The work done with that team later led me to joining a global level team and meeting a few veteran TWers. It also got me working closely with an India-wide program manager, which gave me little bonuses like being featured in a newsletter and receiving great reviews.

4. Importance of appreciation.
   TW brought the culture of giving appreciation in a big way this year, by building an internal application to express gratitude publicly to each other. For added measure, they gamified the experience to ensure maximum participation. Heartfelt messages that would’ve otherwise never been sent were pouring in from every direction. And the after-effect was a lot of people feeling good about themselves and their teammates, and happy to come to work the next day.

5. The power of being reliable.
   Being the smartest person in the room can only take you so far (and my ego has been made painfully aware again this year that I’m not the one). It loses its value when you are not prepared to grind out results by any means imaginable.
   In an industry where there is always more work than can ever be done, delivering on what you promised - being reliable - is gold.

My plan for 2022: DevOps, backend development and improving context switching as a team lead.