2016 year in review

2016 was a great year for me. And now, when it has almost ended, is a great opportunity to review it.

I will use last year’s format and talk about some of my achievements, future goals and this year’s reading list (it is in the end of the post).

 

Writing

This year I’ve written 10 posts on various topics. I’ve written almost 2 times less posts than last year, but some of my posts are way longer than my usual posts (the agile estimations series are 32 pages long!). This year the posts were less technical and they talked about management soft skills, self-improvement and leadership. These posts are hard to write. Despite that I think that this is the kind of posts that I should keep writing. However, I do want that some of my posts to be also technical.

2017: I want to write at least 12 posts. One post a month

 

My favorite posts of 2016

• Should we use MVC for modern web applications?
• Estimations in agile development series
• Weekly thoughts

 

Public Speaking

This year I had a single public talk about website localization in a meetup (video will be up soon). It was great experience since I like presenting very much. I tend to present quite a lot internally in my company but no enough externally.

2017: I want to present at least 4 times at external meetups and conferences

Mentorship

I’ve done a lot this year. From leading different efforts and changes in the company to managing my project and day to day team responsibilities. Some of things went well and others are still in progress. I think that one of my strengths is the ability to execute and finish almost anything. This is all thanks to plenty of opportunities and guideless that allowed me to gain this experience. However, I think that my next step is not to keep executing lots of different efforts by myself. It is time to share the knowledge and start delegate my wishes to others, provide them with the different opportunities and guidance like that was given to me.

2017: I want to mentor others and help them make things happen

Learning

After 5 years I have finally finished my Computer Science degree. This is one the achievements that I’m happy that it is over, however I’m still proud I’ve done it. This year I’ve also learned React.js and its eco system.

In this year I want to learn a “big data” language, like R or Go or even Scala. I have a serious lack of knowledge when it comes to this area. I also want to learn the “electron” framework for creating desktop java script applications. And I want to strengthen my Node.js and React Native skills. They are not as strong as I want them to be.

2017: I want to learn a new programming language, Electron framework and strengthen my node.js and React Native skills. I want to build at least one project for each of this stack

Open source

This year I’ve contributed only once to an open source project (Polly, you can read about it in this post).

In this year I want to make a bigger contribution to the open source community.

2017: I want to contribute to at least 4 different open source projects.

 

Sports

This year was a hard year for me in terms of sports. Until May I was exercising like I was used too, 3-4 times a week in the gym and also running 10km 3 times a week. However, after the Mountain to Valley race, my knee was hurt and it forced me to stop exercising and running the way I wanted until now.

2017: I want to heal my knee and slowly come back to run at least 15km by the end of 2017

 

Reading

I commute to work by train. I hate traffic. It is enjoying and forces you to stay focused on the road, without almost any ability to concentrate on something else. On the train however, I can sit comfortably and do whatever I want. It is 40 minutes, twice a day when I can work, write, rest and of course read. So I try to leave this time for reading. This year I’ve managed to read 13 books this way and also read a lot of stuff online (1% top reader of Pocket ). I love reading both books and online posts, however the books I find the most satisfying and teaching. In the end of the post you can find my 2016 reading list.

2017: I want to read at least 13 books.

 

The best for last – 2016 reading list

I want to share with you the books I’ve read and recommend the top 3.

 

1. Managing humans 3^rd edition

This is a must read book for every manager. It has great tips for almost every possible situation. I started to use many of his recommendations and I already see the results.

 

2. Zero to one

Very interesting book about the startup world. It focuses on the reasons for actually taking an idea and making it into a real product. It has a very unique view and it is written by one of the greatest enterpanures in the world.

 

3. The hard things about hard things

I’m sure that you heard at least someone recommend this book. It touches parts that no one else talks about. This book makes you think, a lot.

Here are the rest, I enjoyed all of them.

 

Happy New Year everybody!

Weekly thoughts

Previously I’ve talked about the importance of a dedicated time for personal reflection, a retrospective of your life. This tool helps me to improve in all aspects of my life. However, my job is a huge part of my life – and I want to make sure that I also constantly improve in it. Moreover, I want to make sure that I constantly improve it. Therefore I’ve create a method that allows me to retrospect my work in all its aspects and, most importantly – to share it with my manager. I call it “Weekly Thoughts”.

Every Wednesday evening, I have a scheduled slot in my calendar for some time for myself (it has to be in your calendar, because what is not in your calendar doesn’t exist). I write it down in an email and then send it to my manager. Unlike an actual retro, I use a slightly different format:

1. Things I’m excited about:
2. Things I’m concerned about:
3. Inbound
1. What is working and we should keep doing
2. What is not working for me
3. Opportunities
4. Outbound
1. What is working and we should keep doing
2. What is not working for me
3. Opportunities
5. People
1. Opportunities
6. Recruiting
7. What concerns my manager and how I can help him

As you can see, the format is different from a regular retro. The main reason is that it isn’t only a retro. Retro is a method for reflecting previous events. However, this method has several other purposes.

What is on your mind?

I call it “weekly thoughts” on purpose. Look at the first two points: “Things I’m excited about” and “Things I’m concerned about”. Unlike a usual retro, I’m not looking for action items; I just try to understand what’s made me tick this week and what’s stopped me from ticking. It can be a cool feature that I delivered, a meetup that I’ve hosted or a simple conversation that made my week. Things that make you tick, that make you happy during the day, are worth mentioning. It is easy to talk about the bad stuff – I want to cherish the good stuff, too.

The things I’m concerned about, on the other hand, I do want to address. So sometimes I’ll create personal action items for them. However, sometimes I don’t know how to treat something – like if one of my team members is leaving, or if a decision takes too long to approve.

Those things are on my mind. They concern me. For good and for bad. There is someone who should know about them: my manager. I schedule the time for my weekly thoughts on a Wednesday since it is the day before my 1 on 1 with him. This allows me to be more prepared for our meeting and also allows him to better understand me. Weekly thoughts is such a powerful tool because it allows me to share the full context of my work with my manager.

Don’t keep your thoughts to yourself. Share, ask for advice or direction.

What is your role in the manager-employee relationship?

There is an important truth that all of us sometimes forget.

We are not the only concern of our managers

They also have goals and tasks that do not necessarily concern us. Decisions that they want to take, some efforts they are pushing and, of course, tasks from their own manager. I’ve realized along the way that the fact I have a manager doesn’t mean this is a one-way relationship. I can help him as much as he helps me. I want my manager to succeed in his goals as much as he wants me to succeed in mine.

Therefore I have a special part in my format that is dedicated for the things that concern my manager and ways I can help him.

What happens in other aspects of your job?

“Job” is a short word (so is “work”) that has many parts, aspects and responsibilities – so when I say that I want to improve my work, I want to improve it in all of its parts. I choose to divide my job into 4 aspects:

Inbound, outbound, people and recruiting (I know that in the future this format will change, since I’ll have more or different responsibilities. But it works for now).

I want to separately focus on each part, and try to see what “works for me” and what doesn’t. Each of these parts deserves its own retro.

In the inbound part, I focus on my team. How is our communication? How can we increase velocity? Are we happy? Do we celebrate wins? Do we achieve our goals, and so on.

In the outbound part, I focus on everything that is external to my team. The interfaces with our stakeholders, the product owner, peers and other teams in R&D, and the company in general. Does our work hurt them? How can we share our knowledge with them? And how can we improve our process?

The people part may seem unnecessary since I already have the “inbound” part. However, my team members deserve a focused and dedicated part just for them. In the inbound section I think mostly about us as a team, a group of people who work together and can do it better. In the “people” part, I try to better understand every one individually. What makes them tick, what concerns them and how can I help them?

The last part is recruiting. Not only is recruiting a very important responsibility, it also requires a lot of time and attention. Therefore it has a dedicated part in my format, in order to see what works for me in the recruiting process and what doesn’t. Where do I and all the other recruiters waste time that shouldn’t be wasted? And what methods I find better than others.

What opportunities are you missing?

You can see that in almost every section there is an “Opportunities” part. Here I try to think a little about the future. What we should start doing now in order to improve or be ready for in the near-future. This is very powerful, since we rarely think about the future. We are so focused on today’s “fire” and tomorrow’s delivery that we basically never think about the opportunities we might be missing. By the way, you will need to miss some of those opportunities for whatever important reason. But there is a big difference when you knowingly miss opportunities and when you simply miss them because you are not aware of them in the first place.

My first job was at the age of 12 (I washed the stairs of my building), and since then I have worked almost all the time – after school, in the summer, during my military service (I consider my army duty as a software engineer as work) and now. So for the last 13 years I’ve been constantly working. I have learned that if you try to think further ahead, constantly try to improve yourself and your surroundings, and share your thoughts with your manager, you will gain two very important things: Change and Trust.

Think about it ;)

This is what I read

I read a lot. I think that reading is one of most important activities one can do in order to improve and become better.

I share most of what I read on my Twitter account. Recently more and more people ask me where I find the stuff I read. So I decided to share with you my sources.

There are 5 main sources where I constantly find great articles, videos and posts:

1. Feedly – here I keep my blog roll (you can find the full list in the end of this post). It is a simple RSS reader where I subscribe to the blogs that are the most relevant to me and which I want to be up to date with their content. if I land on a good post in an unfamiliar blog, I go through the last 3-4 posts and if most of the content is actually good and relevant, then I add the blog to Feedly.

2. Twitter – unlike Facebook, that is full of my friends posts (and pictures), in Twitter I follow business newspapers, tech news, engineering content, leading CEO’s and tech world “celebrities”.

Netanel Lev wrote once a post describing the difference between Twitter and Google Reader (like Feedly) - Twitter is my radio station, Google Reader is my disc player! This post describes perfectly the difference between a RSS reader that has predictable content that you have chosen like music on a CD (Yes I know, that is an old post ). And Twitter, that is unpredictable and “every new tweet is a song that maybe I like or not”.

3. Pocket recommendations – Pocket is my favorite and most used app. I keep there everything I find interesting, in order to read it later, when I have time. Another cool Pocket feature is a recommendations feed that is created by different members of the Pocket community (the content that they recommend to others, and by Pocket itself using personalization mechanisms). The more you read the better recommendations Pocket will provide for you.

4. Software Lead Weekly – this is a weekly mailing list created by Oren Ellenbogen. It aggregates great articles and videos regarding tech, leadership, startups and engineering culture.

5. Books! Posts, articles, videos, tweets are great way to learn new things and be updated with what happens in the world. However, if you wish to master something and become a true expert you have to read books. A post by some expert can get you this far, but a whole book that is written by that same expert will teach you whole lot more. This post has a list of 95 books in various topics that are probably relevant to you. This is a great place to start building your library.

I think that you should have at least 2 sources (besides reading books):

(1) A blog roll that you have picked based on your interests (you can use any RSS reader, Feedly is my choice).

(2) “An unpredictable radio” – Twitter, Pocket, Medium and more in order to be exposed to new sources and things you didn’t know that exist.

Keep reading!

 

As promised here is my blog roll:

.NET

1. http://dailydotnettips.com/ - Short posts of great tips in .NET and Visual Studio

2. https://visualstudiomagazine.com/Home.aspx - .NET news

3. https://shonnlyga.wordpress.com/ - a friend of mine who writes about .NET related stuff

4. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/ (podcast)  - no need to listen to all of the episodes – pick the ones that you feel are relevant to you

5. https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/

6. https://ayende.com/blog/ - Oren Eini, one of the best developers in Israel (some say that in the world). He used to write about .NET low level stuff but now most of his posts are about RavenDB (his product - .NET based DB), Sometimes he shares some bugs that they had and more interesting stuff

7. https://visualstudiomagazine.com/rss-feeds/blogs.aspx - Visual studio blog posts

8. https://visualstudiomagazine.com/rss-feeds/news.aspx - Visual Studio news

9. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet . NET announcements

10. http://visualstudiomagazine.com/rss-feeds/features.aspx -new features in the NET world

Architecture:

1. https://lostechies.com/ a blog with several great writers: the creator of AutoMapper, CQRS and event Sourcing experts and more

2. http://martinfowler.com/ - The one and only Martin Fowler.

3. http://www.aviransplace.com/ - Head of WIX backend. He writes about software solutions, architecture and management

4. http://www.softwarearchiblog.com/ - The best Israeli Hebrew blog.

5. http://enterprisecraftsmanship.com/

UX:

1. http://uxi.org.il/

Tech stuff:

1. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ - Scott Hanselman’s blog

2. http://www.hanselminutes.com/ - Scott Hanselman’s podcast

3. https://thefutureorganization.com/ - Hebrew Tech podcast. My favourite episodes are “Bumpers” – one hour of 2-3 minutes short discussion about variety of technology topics like frameworks, tools, announcements , posts and more 

4. http://blog.house-of-code.com/ - Yossi Shmueli’s blog

Culture:

1. http://blog.crisp.se/ - Used to work in Spotify and now in Lego!! Greatposts about agile, lean and culture

2. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joel Spolsky the creator of Stack Overflow and Trello. Worth following him on Twitter.

3. http://blog.karmona.com/ - Moti Karmona’s blog

4. https://blog.8thlight.com/ - culture and leadership – software oriented

5. http://www.mngttips.com/ - Hebrew podcast about management

6. http://shavua.net/ - The BEST Hebrew podcast! It’s about startups. They interview the biggest Israeli CEO’s, CTO’s and enterpanures about their startups success or failure.

7. https://thefutureorganization.com/ - Podcast regarding the culture in different organizations and startups

8. https://lnetanel.com/ - Netanel Lev’s blog

9. https://medium.com/@rabashani/ - Shani Raba’s blog

10. http://randsinrepose.com/

11. http://www.timeninjablog.com/ – time management tips

12. https://apakash.wordpress.com/ Alon Pakash’s blog

Web:

1. https://fivejs.codeschool.com/ - 10 minutes podcast episodes about the latest libraries and feature in JS.

2. https://internet-israel.com/ - Hebrew blog

Tech companies blogs:

1. http://blog.wix.engineering/ - Wix blog

2. https://code.facebook.com/ - Facebook blog - Priceless!!!!

3. https://labs.spotify.com/ - Spotify

4. http://nerds.airbnb.com/ - Airbnb

5. https://baremetrics.com/

6. https://blog.twitter.com/ - Twitter

7. http://githubengineering.com/ - Github

8. http://engineering.instagram.com/ - Instagram

9. https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/rss - Pinterest

10. http://techblog.netflix.com/ - Netflix

The Project of Your Life

By settings personal goals we improve ourselves and become better. I use Lean and Scrum principles for creating and tracking my personal goals.

Keep reading and see how it works.

 

When working on some project we set milestones, long term goals, short term goals and KPIs.

We track progress and learn from our work by having retrospective meetings and checkpoints along the way.

Now imagine you have a very large project ahead of you and you don’t plan at all. You just float and react to the different events along the way. Do you think you can make it right? On time? On budget? The answer, like always, is “it depends”. However, it’s more likely that you won’t.

In order to succeed, we need to manage our life and not be managed by it. You need to manage it exactly like you would manage that project.

Your life is a project and you are its developer, designer and product manager

How many times did you say to yourself that you need to be better in this and that you should learn that? How many of those goals have you actually accomplished?

The first step is to define what you want. I personally like this article. It makes me think about my strengths, weaknesses and just the things I want to know. I have a dedicated time every six months when I go over these questions and create my long term goals. These goals are the things I want to accomplish in order to be successful and better than I am today. I keep them in my Google Keep notes.

*These are my personal goals:

Every personal (and not just personal) goal should be well defined (SMART goal).

Specific – Your goal definition should answer these questions: Who is involved? What do I want to accomplish? When?
Measurable – How can you measure progress and know if you are done?
Attainable – How can this goal come true?
Realistic – Be honest with yourself. Don’t define unreachable goals.
Timely – Provide a time frame. Then, creating 6 month goals, you are ready to do it.

Breaking Down Long-term Goals to Short-term Goals

Defining long term goals is the first step in improving. Setting a goal is better than setting no goals at all. Writing it down is a commitment to yourself.

In order to accomplish a long-term goal, which is usually a big goal (I want to master JavaScript, etc.), we need to break it down to smaller pieces – smaller goals (milestones) that we’ll accomplish along the way. Those goals should also be SMART goals. I have a recurring monthly time when I go over my long-term goals and decide what I want to do this month in order to get closer to accomplishing the whole goal. Like in Lean development, I constantly adopt and change my goals according to the situation (Perhaps there is no reason why I should learn JavaScript anymore?).

The monthly short-term goals don’t always have to correlate to the long-term goals. Perhaps I want to take care of something in my job or maybe learn something that is not part of my long-term goals and is important for the following month. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. As long as you take time to think about it, take a decision and commit to it by writing it down you will improve and be better. That is the whole point.

If you have never tried to “manage” your life and set goals for yourself, then I suggest you start with monthly goals. Think about the month ahead of you and try to define how this month will become a successful one.

If you have set personal goals before, then I suggest you take it further.

A month is a lot of time – four whole weeks! Usually when we have so much time ahead of us, we won’t start any task until the very end-and that is only if someone reminds us about it in the first place. That’s called the student syndrome.

Weekly and Daily goals

Scrum uses sprints in order to prevent the student syndrome. I like to look on my weeks as sprints. Every week has a sprint planning and a retro. I go over the previous week’s calendar and see how it went. I try to find the things I need to be better in and the things  I need to preserve and keep doing. This way I can improve and track my progress weekly. At the beginning of the week I have a dedicated time for planning my weekly goals which are subsets of my monthly goals, and the tasks I need to accomplish this week regardless of any long-/short-term goal.

During the week I have a “daily standup meeting” (although I do it on the train on my way to work) using Any.DO. This has a very cool feature that at 08:00 makes me go over my daily tasks and decide when I want to do them (sometime today or later this week).

It is simply a to-do list that reminds me of the tasks I need to accomplish every day.

Every week ends with a retro. I go over my previous week and write down important notes, facts and decisions. I write them in Penzu, which is basically a diary with a very cool feature –every week it sends me the note I wrote a year ago. This way, I’m constantly being reminded of my decisions (you need to use it for a year in order for it to be effective - don’t give up!).

Summary

If you want to improve, you need to set personal goals.

The goals should be both long- and short-term.

Track both of them in Google Keep.

Every week, set yourself weekly goals and have e retro for the previous week. Write it down in Penzu and be reminded of it afterwards.

Have a daily meeting using Any.Do.

 

 

This works for me, perhaps it can also work for you.

Or maybe I’m just crazy

 

Acknowledgments:

Netanel Lev and Shani Raba for reviewing the post.

My 2016 Goals and 2015 Reading List

2015 was a great year! I’ve worked on some of the coolest projects that I know. I’ve learned the internals on Angular 1.X and typescript. I’ve also started a new job (which is awesome) and made a pivot towards mobile development.

I’m certain that 2016 will be even greater!

Now when 2015 is over I’d like to start a personal tradition for myself in the blog. In the end of every year I’ll set personal goals for the year to come. The goals will cover the blog topics and the desired reading list for the next year. In the end of the next year I’ll go over the goals and verify that I’ve accomplished all of them. I will also list all the books I’ve read in that year so that maybe you will find something that suits you.
 
Let’s Start

This year I wrote 20 posts in my blog which are almost 3 times more than last year!

2016 Goal: Write at least 20 post.

I want to focus on mobile, agile and management topics. I will write on any other topic that I think is worth writing about but these topics will be the core.

Here are some ideas about the upcoming posts:

Mobile oriented posts:
1. TDD in IOS
2. IOS and Android best practices

Agile:
1. The psychology of Scrum
2. Retro done right
3. Agile estimations
 

2015 Reading List

Call me old fashioned but I love reading hardcopy books. My dream is to have a huge library filled will all the best books in the world. I always try to diversify and read different types of books.

I think that I did really well this year and picked awesome books. By the way - this is a great website where you can buy books with free shipping worldwide.

2016 Goal: Read books about management, leadership, innovation and at least one tech book. At least 10 books in total.
 

Here are the books I’ve read in 2015.

1. Steve Jobs – on the greatest minds that ever lived. He had an amazing and not ordinary life (the movies don’t get even close to the real deal). You must read this book if you consider yourself a manager or an entrepreneur.


2. The Last Lecture – an amazing book written by a man that was going to die. This is not one of those books about dying. It is about living. Living the life that you will not regret. The book is about the author’s last lecture which you can also watch here.


3. The Lean Startup
This is a must book for every manager and entrepreneur. It is well written, pragmatic and has lots of great real life examples.


4. 4 Hours Work Week
Life hacker Tim Ferriss in a great book about efficiency and building the life you dream about. It shows that your dreams can be accomplished. Just start and stay focused.


5. How Google Works
The managers of Google share the experience that they gained while working in Google.


6. The Leader Who Had No Title
Robin Sharma is one of the best leadership and life improving authors that I’ve encountered. I enjoyed reading all of his books. In my opinion this one is not as good as the “leadership wisdom” but it has lots of great topics in it (just read both).


7. Start-Up Nation
Great book that tries to determine how a tiny country like Israel has the largest amount of successful startups in the world.


8. The Passionate Programmer
Actually that is not a good book. The title doesn’t fit the content. It’s mostly about how not to lose your job. Don’t read it.


9. מחשבות לעט לילה
Haim Shapira writes about three philosophers: Nitsche, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. How did they live, what did they believe in and why? Very interesting.


10. High Output Management
Andy Grove’s book that is considered to be the Holy Grail of management books. It was written in 1983 and it is still accurate for this day. He covers all the aspects of being a manager. Great book, it’s a must read.

 

Allow me to repeat the 2016 goals:
1. Write at least 20 blog posts.
2. Read at least 10 books.
 



I like these goals :)

Now it’s time to start working on them.
Have a great year!

TED: Find mentors and read books

This is a great lecture about making your dreams come true. 

We all want a good life. We all want to be great. However greatness doesn't just come to us. We have to pay for it. We have to invest in ourselves - become greater and constantly achieve new goals.

We can do it by our self the hard way but there are people who've already succeeded, people who can teach you and guide you - they should be you mentors. Find them! They could be your shortcut.

Some of the greatest mentors in the world are dead and others are unreachable (perhaps Bill Gates will answer my emails some day), that doesn't mean that you cannot learn from them. Read their books, their blogs and listen to their podcasts and interviews. If you want to be great you must learn from the great.

I want a good life. I'm not there yet, it will be hard, but I'm willing to pay for it.

.

TED: Your body language shapes who you are

Great TED lecture that shows how our body language affects the way we think about ourselves, the impression we create on others and basically how it shapes who we are.

So next time you will be facing a job interview, a presentation you are giving or anything you want to be awesome at remember: a couple of minutes before that job interview  stand in a "victory position"

and not in a "I'm afraid" position.

Think about it ;)