Welcome to the 2017 “bullets” post (previous years).
This year was … really kind of hard. For a lot of people. I honestly didn’t touch my bullets.txt file until the fall, neglecting to recognize my accomplishments as I did them. In addition, I noticed that because I haven’t been journaling, when I did add to the file, I added more personal things as well, with various happenings and mile markers. So for this year, rather than categories or a bullet list of professional news, I’m going by season.
Winter
January to Marchish
This was the first time I got to meet one of my team members (Corey) in-person, at our first ever IOpipe all-hands in New Orleans (I very much had a hand in suggesting the warm location with lots of good restaurants).
I also met my first nephew, Elliot, who is not on the internet yet, since he’s less than one year old and has some privacy. I took a sketch comedy writing class and went to Mexico (Mexico is the best-ico!) with a bunch of friends from RC and had a most amazing time.
Spring
Marchish to May
In spring, I wrote and taught a GDI course in build tools, which I hope to eventually teach again, and to open source under the larger GDI umbrella. It’s open source now if you’d like to check it out.
I also went to 3 weddings, one of which I was a bridesmaid in and wrote a speech for the ceremony (hi Lindi!!), attended my first Google I/O (thanks Steven for being the most amazing Google I/O buddy), and spoke at OSCON, which was one of my big conference speaking goals, and I got to go to Austin and hang out with my friend Danh and his excellent fluffy cats, and visit my (as then) new coworker, Kas.
I published video from OSCON, which is an intro to serverless computing, should you find that interesting.
We also started recording Turing-Incomplete again, and should be recording a year-in-review episode to wrap up Season 2 shortly.
Summer
June to August
I had one wedding (for my ex-mother-in-law who was not ex- at the time) in the summer and fulfilled one of my long time personal dreams: had an all-vegan BBQ for Fourth of July. It was truly lovely. My friend Rachel found a grill on a trash day, and so our vision was born.
Summer was a lot of fun with many beach trips, cracking down at IOpipe to get to GA (and then GA happened! there was lots of awesome press coverage surrounding AWS Summit NYC), and formally adopting an engineering manager role at IOpipe, managing the 3 engineers on our tech team (while I also still produce code myself, thus I have the title of Software Engineering Lead).
Fall
September to December
In the fall I had my final wedding of the year (praise God) as a bridesmaid at my lovely friend Gianna’s wedding. In the same month (September), I started divorce proceedings. I’ve said in the past that this blog doesn’t get very personal and then sometimes shared personal things and you know, hey, it’s a big thing this year. Things are getting better for me every day, to be honest, but it’s a Thing.
At work, we had our second off-site, this time in Seattle. We were 5 people in January, and by September we had nearly doubled to 9, quite a big difference. I love how fast things are moving and very excited for what we have in store. After the off-site, I attended Strange Loop which was a wonderful recharge to hang out with so so many RC people, learn awesome stuff about computers. I do wish there were more serverless content, but maybe next time.
The fall was generally big: I keynoted two conferences (LibertyJS and DevFest NYC), won and sold a GPU from a raffle, AWS Re:Invent happened, and IOpipe had a great week during that conf and quite a few cool projects were released (my work on profiling was demoed on-stage in front of thousands of people, my team made servers.lol to teach you about Lambda, to name a couple things), and I did two Hour of Code events.
This was my third year volunteering at Waring since my friend and I started bringing in volunteers three years ago, but the first year the project was adopted by the Friends of Waring community organization, which I am frankly stoked about. It’s really important for the schools’ own organizations (vs. me, Pam) to own these efforts. I also helped a Girl Scout troop/help them get a computer badge using Hour of Code materials, and seeing girls demo their games to their parents was the best:
Thoughts
My first thoughts are “jfc this fall was a lot,” which it was (edit: however, I also only started real-time recording bullets again in the fall, so surely I missed things in winter/spring/summer). I also am happy with some of the big accomplishments in there, writing a new course, speaking at one of my goal conferences, two keynotes including a conference I (co)founded (write up here of some of my remarks). And I can’t emphasize enough to myself how much work a start-up has been, taking up a lot more brain space than say, working in corporate. I’m hoping to work more on some personal projects in 2018, including some internet-of-cats-related automation.
And you won’t find it on here, but I’m happy that my meditation practice has been fairly consistent all year, and my athletics have kicked ass. I ran a sub-30 minute 5K for the first time in November (26:35). Perhaps I should start adding my athletics to the bullets.txt – one thing I’m hoping for 2018 is to do a century ride, likely in the fall, which is very do-able. I’m also backpacking next month (~5 days) during anti-winter 2018 after some remote work. It’s gonna be awesome (or not, but at least it’ll be interesting 😉 )
Looking back on last year’s post and my goals, I did travel a bit less (only one international flight, and not terribly far! [Mexico]), and I’m also now in a leadership program (Leadership Philadelphia Keepers) meeting some great leaders in the Philadelphia area and working with a coach to do some more long-term visioning and thinking about my goals.
My goals at this point are to continue movement – keep working on leadership, keep working on my athletic goals, keep building IOpipe, keep on bringing focus back to my own projects and my own creativity. All at the same time having a deep respect for my own limits. As they like to say, you can do it all, but you can’t do it all at once and that has to be okay.
A wonderful summary Pam. Glad you were able to do so many of things that you wanted to accomplish, without over doing it too much. I hope that this coming year has many more ups than downs. I also particularly liked how you helped the Girl Scouts get their computer badges! Thank you for sharing.
Thanks Mike 🙂