At the end of 2020 I was disappointed to realise with COVID that we hadn't dived into our usual annual review, and I did my own personal annual review over the new years break which was really helpful to me. (Also, it didn't just cover work things!)
When I talked to my manager in early 2021 about the GROW/GLOBE/GROWTH worksheet, I realised I had this in my journal upstairs. While my review was a lot due to some challenging things I'd been dealing with, I was really pleased to have a solid list of achievements for the year at hand!
Here's what I had:
Achievements
Maintained & improved my development and project delivery standards and practices over the year, with reference to the wider open source community and Catalyst's internal standards eg The Catalyst Test.
Worked to deliver positive change through leading by example. This included:
- Continuing program of establishing or improving test / CI coverage across all projects I engaged with.
- Advocating for and normalising code review as an requirement of project process.
- Improving project documentation to ensure clear guidance on process and future maintainability.
Contributed to RFPs for Ministry of Education, Treasury, LINZ and (less significantly) NZ Police. This was a new and challenging area of work to contribute to, and I felt that my efforts were valued and we achieved good outcomes. I enjoy the communication and writing aspects of this work.
Provided peer support and training. Supported team members to become more familiar with testing and CI process, active presence in chat channels to assist developers on their journey.
Ensured that I documented clearly whenever possible. I made 384 edits to the Catalyst Wiki in 2020!
Organised and facilitated workshop in Christchurch to share knowledge around CI and testing process. Followed up with additional support on CI improvements across projects for other team members.
Maintained & developed presence in Drupal community by learning and sharing in the open. Attended DrupalSouth 2021 virtual conference, awarded one of several event prizes for engagement. Regularly active in regional and topical Drupal chat channels.
Continued contributing to various open source projects & communities. See:
- https://gitlab.com/users/xurizaemon
- https://github.com/xurizaemon
- https://www.drupal.org/user/76026/track/code
Contributed to Matrix chat rollout with testing, documentation, planning and bot development. My Catathon project from 2018 formed the basis for a Matrix-compatible bot implementation, which includes thorough documentation. Wormy is risen!
Engaged in collaborative technical leadership through active sharing of development process & learning - see Working Loud blog.
Established personal support / development relationship with staff from another team for co-mentoring & peer development.
Asked to guide and direct establishment of reproducible Drupal project processes and practices in the scope of the Treasury project.
In the first quarter of 2021 I've been nominated and elected to the Eight and invited to participate in the Inclusivity Team. I'm really happy to be engaging in these places as they add depth to my technical work and allow me to support some of the special culture Catalyst has.
I've worked to ensure our team are co-ordinating and communicating in our various systems - organising team meetings, including all members correctly in email distribution lists, raising allocation gaps on projects, and contributing to our best practices WRs and issue queue.