This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
Hey there, fellow Adventurers!
This post releases on January 2... welcome to the New Year! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 I thought I'd take a moment to look back on 2024 today. I think retrospectives are very important; reflecting on what went well, what went poorly, and what we plan to do differently gives us an easy framework with which to pursue excellence.
Where We Were
On January 2, 2024, The Adventures of Blink was a blog with nine posts. I had started my dev.to account a year and a half earlier, thinking it might be a good thing to work on in conjunction with a job change I'd just gone through, but then it fell by the wayside immediately.
However, as 2024 dawned, I found myself in a job search. My role had been eliminated a month before and I was actively applying and interviewing with many different companies. A pattern I noticed during this process was that many of the companies asked me to provide a portfolio so they could get to know me... and I found myself without one. 😱
It was actually right about the turn of the year that I got the idea to revive the blog and use it as a place to build my portfolio... and then I added Youtube as a 'stretch goal'. When you're looking for DevRel positions, you have to be comfortable on camera as well as writing; thus I needed to practice those skills as well.
And so The Adventures of Blink was reborn - from a little blog that didn't have much purpose, to a place where you and I can adventure together.
With that as the backdrop, let's start the retro!
2024: What Went Well
I don't know about you but I'm often uncomfortable with this part of a retrospective. I spend so much of my life in critical analysis that when someone wants to know what wins I'm celebrating, I'm often caught off guard! I share this because as I learn and grow, I come to understand I'm not the only one. So if that sounds like you too, hang in there! It gets better with practice!
Win 1: We started Adventuring together
The mere existence of the blog / channel has been valuable to me personally. Of course I had goals of building a community of adventurers so that I could have something to show off in my job search, but... actually doing the work and putting in the time to learn things so I could share them here made a big difference in the way I view the world. I'm no longer content to wait for someone else to do something; if I know how to do it, and it needs done, I've found fulfillment in just getting it done.
Win 2: Intentional Pacing
As I was on an active job search, I pushed myself really hard for the first few months. I needed to build that portfolio to a reasonable size as fast as I could so I'd have it to point to!
Once I got beyond the immediate job search problem, though, I did something else that I've never been good at: I paced myself intentionally. I took a couple months off for the summer and refreshed, and then decided to make The Adventures of Blink a seasonal series.
This was life-changing for me - I have always been the guy who went full-throttle until I burned out completely and then let things fall into decay. The idea of taking extended breaks intentionally between seasons, which you probably think of as perfectly normal and reasonable, was totally foreign to me.
Win 3: Achievable but Formidable Adventures
Just as I struggle with pacing, I also have a tendency to "bite off more than I can chew". I make grand plans that end up being way too much for the time/space/budget allotted (ask @meganspeir about that sometime 🤣). So when I started thinking of a seasonal approach to TAoB, I struggled mightily with what I could fit into a season.
This year, I learned to tell myself NO at appropriate points, so that I could keep my plans achievable.
Win 4: We learned a TON
As I look back over this year's Adventures, we have covered a LOT of stuff! A quick list:
- Thunkable, a no-code way to build mobile apps
- Becoming a DevOps Practitioner
- Facial Recognition in Python
- How to Win with Developers
- Building cool stuff with Large Language Models
- Docker
- Mongo database
- Flask APIs in Python
- GitHub Actions
- PyTest
- TKinter
- Snyk for supply-chain security
- Prometheus and Grafana
- Applying AI tools as agents in an application
Y'all... that's a ton of things to learn!
What Went Poorly
It's important to frame "what went poorly" really carefully - if you don't, it's easy to take the items personally and get discouraged by them. But when we talk about things that went badly, we aren't assigning blame; we're merely surfacing these issues so that we can address them.
Loss 1: Procrastination
I frequently found myself down to the wire, getting edits done mere hours before the Adventure was going live. This isn't where I wanted to be - I don't like feeling rushed. There are some benefits, perhaps - I don't get an opportunity to overthink things, so I'm more likely to just go with something that works... but I'd prefer to be a few weeks ahead of time so I have some room to breathe.
Loss 2: Hurricanes
This one was out of my hands - but the area where I live was hit hard by a hurricane and we lost power for a couple of days. This is why I'd like to have a little more space in the schedule (see Procrastinations 🙃)... unforeseen events can knock me off my schedule.
Loss 3: Identity Crisis
I'm still dealing with this, a bit - something I really want to find is a solid identity for The Adventures of Blink. Is it a game-dev channel? Is it a DevOps channel? Is it about evaluating interesting tools? Is it just where I rant about bad practices I see in the industry? What's the purpose of these adventures?
What To Do Differently
Identifying good and bad things is a solid first step, but it doesn't amount to anything if you don't plan to do anything differently! So what are some steps I intend to take to improve the adventure?
Change 1: Develop Social Media Posting Discipline
My fellow adventurers find me via social media. While dev.to has a great distribution mechanism that brings in lots of folks, I'd really like to reach folks on other platforms better.
Change 2: Get a Couple Episodes Ahead
A goal for season 3 is to produce the episodes (at the very least) a few episodes ahead. That way if something unexpected happens, I'll have some time to adjust rather than having to delay releases.
Wrapping up the Wrap-up
Friends, it has been an absolute pleasure to adventure with you this year. I've started on the plan for Season 3 in the Spring - make sure you subscribe to the Youtube channel so you'll get updates when the new episodes drop! In the meantime, there will be a few blog posts between now and the S3 premiere, so make sure to keep an eye out for those!
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