Fabio Cicerchia

Past Year Review (2019)

In Time Management

It all started as a New Year’s Resolution. This year I wanted to make it happen for real, and, by knowing myself pretty well, I had to put it to a whole new level in order to make it to the end. Moved with all the good intentions of my last certification (AWS Solutions Architect) got in Sep ’18, I decided to keep up the momentum and get a few more: Security+, ITIL, PRINCE2 and Lego Serious Play.

Then it became a huge black-hole. I’ve got sucked in, more tasks got added, more tasks got dropped, and it changed quite frequently.

I managed it quite well and I’ve got satisfied (and even surprised) with my results.

TL;DR

Report

  • Read Books: 35/38 – 92%
    • I’ve read at least 4180 pages, and at my slow pace of reading, it took me ~140 hours.
  • Certifications Plan: 9/14 – 64%
  • Read Articles on Pocket: 550+ items read
  • Watch Video Courses: 79/81 – 97%
    • Youtube Videos: 32/32 – 100%
    • Udemy: 5/7 – 71%
    • LinkedIn Learning Courses: 45/45 – 100%
    • I’ve watched at least 100 hours of video contents (150hrs at 1.5x speed)
  • Publish Ebooks: 2/2 – 100%
  • Write Blog Posts: 2/12 – 18%
  • Upwork Tests: 9/40 – 22%
  • Extras (non-quantitative)
    • Parenting
    • Bought a house (including packing & unpacking + small renovation)
    • Tried to start a “business“
    • Hold a talk at a local meetup PUG Roma
    • Wrote a couple of ebooks
    • Started playing around with R, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda
    • Decluttering Inboxes
    • Being 24/7/365 on-call

Category Completion Progress

Long Story

Rules

These are the “rules” I’ve implicitly followed without actually define them at the beginning. So basically there were no explicit rules, and that made it easier for me to commit to a huge plan.

  • I have no pressure whatsoever
  • It’s my own personal planning
  • I can switch tasks at any time
  • I can cancel tasks at any time
  • I can add tasks at any time
  • I have to define an outline
  • Tend to spend as less as possible, so not to feel guilty about it
  • Catch every possible moment to advance with the task
  • Track percentage progresses
  • Since colour feedback is important I’ve used the following (loose) ranges to give me more confidence
    • 0% is red
    • <50% is orange
    • >50% is green

Stages

I’ve decided to split the work in chunks of good-enough size, without taking in account the time to complete them, nor the amount of task. It was totally a subjective feeling at each stage.

  • Stage #1
    • Completed at 67%
    • ~20 Activities
    • 18 February – 28 February (10 days – start small to give it a try)
    • $0 spent
  • Stage #2
    • Completed at 83%
    • ~50 Activities
    • 25 February – 12 April (47 days)
    • $11 spent
  • Stage #3
    • Completed at 57%
    • ~100 Activities
    • 3 April – 6 August (126 days)
    • 17€ spent
    • Notes: In this period I’ve moved house, so it’s fine if it’s a bit lower than expected
  • Stage #4
    • Completed at 46%
    • ~30 Activities
    • 7 August – 20 September (45 days)
    • $47 spent
    • Note: I didn’t achieve much because I didn’t book any of the 3 certifications I’ve studied for (got a bit more money-cautious after buying the house – it was over 1000€). Estimated 71%.
  • Stage #5
    • Completed at 70%
    • ~100 Activities
    • 21 September – 31 Dec (102 days)
    • 34€ spent

Stages Completion Progress

I’ve managed to keep the money spent quite low because I’ve mostly read books I’ve already owned, or by purchasing the kindle edition or used the trial period of Kindle Unlimited.

It seems that working in cycles of ~50 days gave me more chance to get things done properly (let’s say in a good-enough way).

Stages Duration

Toolbox

The whole planning

Read Books 92%

Notes: #9 was supposed to be completed at stage 3. #23, #24, #25 and #26 got cancelled as I’ve realised there was no need to read them at that time.

Certifications Plan 64%

I’ve watched 65 hours of mixed video contents, assuming that I’ve increased the speed, at least, at 1.5x, effectively I’ve watched 43 hours.

  1. Lego Serious Play
    1. Unfortunately, it was a bit too expensive for me, since all my certifications are self-funded. But definitively a must-have for my bucket-list.
  2. Stage #3 CTO Bootcamp 90%
  3. Stage #4 ITIL v4 POSTPONED
  4. Stage #4 PRINCE2 Agile POSTPONED
  5. Stage #4 CompTIA Security+ POSTPONED
  6. Stage #5 Cybersecurity Specialization
    1. Usable Security
    2. Software Security
    3. Cryptography
    4. Hardware Security
    5. Cybersecurity Capstone Project
  7. Stage #5 GCP Developer Enablement Program
  8. Stage #5 Azure fundamentals
  9. Stage #5 Evolve your DevOps practices
  10. Stage #5 Architect great solutions in Azure
  11. Stage #5 Master Cloud-Native Infrastructure with Kubernetes
  12. Stage #5 Improve Your Infrastructure Automation with HashiCorp Tools
  13. Stage #5 Master the OWASP Top 10
  14. Stage #5 Applying Lean, DevOps, and Agile to Your IT Organization

Read Articles on Pocket 100%

  • 550+ URLs
    • It took me 3 stages to go over all the items to reach Inbox 0…
    • … then I’ve made it grew again, but now I’ve educated myself to read daily some of the articles.
    • Since Pocket doesn’t store the timestamp of when the articles have been read and since I didn’t bother to keep tracking of it I cannot provide a precise figure about it. So I’ve started with 350 items at least and let’s assume I’ve only read 200 more items in the rest of the year (very underestimated)

Watch Youtube Videos 100%

I’ve watched 19 hours of YouTube contents, assuming that I’ve increased the speed, at least, at 1.5x, effectively I’ve watched 13 hours.

  1. Stage #1 Matheus Gontijo – Clean Code, Object Calisthenics and Best Practices
  2. Stage #1 Software Architecture vs. Code • Simon teal
  3. Stage #1 Paradoxes and theorems every developer should know (Joshua Thijssen)
  4. Stage #1 Scrum vs. SAFe • Tomas Eilsø
  5. Stage #1 Patterns of Effective Teams • Dan North
  6. Stage #1 Forget Velocity, Let’s Talk Acceleration • Jessica Kerr
  7. Stage #1 Enterprise Programming Tricks For Clean Code
  8. Stage #1 The Myth of the Genius Programmer
  9. Stage #3 Congrats! You’re the tech lead – now what? Eryn O’Neil
  10. Stage #3 Leading Leads – Lessons from a growing team – Monika Piotrowicz
  11. Stage #3 The Constant Life of a Tech Lead – Patrick Kua
  12. Stage #3 Leadership Lessons from the Agile Manifesto – Anjuan Simmons
  13. Stage #3 Rethinking the Developer Career Path – Randall Koutnik
  14. Stage #3 Leading by Speaking – Lara Hogan
  15. Stage #3 Levelling Up: The Way of the Lead Developer – Patrick Kua
  16. Stage #3 The New Manager Death Spiral – Michael Lopp
  17. Stage #3 The Critical Career Path Conversation – John Riviello
  18. Stage #3 First Steps as a Lead – Dan Persa
  19. Stage #3 Andrea Provaglio – Understanding agile leadership
  20. Stage #3 Rethinking Leadership • Andrea Provaglio
  21. Stage #3 Building a High-Performance Team is Everyone’s Job • Camille Fournier
  22. Stage #3 Leadership at Every Level • Liz Keogh
  23. Stage #3 How to take great Engineers & make them great Technical Leaders • Courtney Hemphill
  24. Stage #3 Principles of Technology Leadership | Bryan Cantrill
  25. Stage #3 Scaling Yourself • Scott Hanselman
  26. Stage #3 How to spot a leader in their handwriting | Jamie Mason Cohen
  27. Stage #3 Technical Leadership • Laura Paterson & Patrick Kua
  28. Stage #4 The Geek’s Guide to Leading Teams • Patrick Kua
  29. Stage #4 Ten Mistakes Team Leaders Make

Notes: The #28 and #29 were supposed to be completed at stage 3, but since I was doing great it didn’t bother me if I didn’t complete just 2 videos.

Watch Udemy Courses 50%

I’ve watched, in Stage #2, 5 hours of Udemy contents, assuming that I’ve increased the speed, at least, at 1.5x, effectively I’ve watched 3.5 hours.

Watch LinkedIn Learning Courses 100%

I’ve watched, in Stage #5, 62 hours of LinkedIn Learning contents, assuming that I’ve increased the speed, at least, at 1.5x, effectively I’ve watched 41 hours.

  1. Create a CRM Mobile Application with React Native
  2. Ethical Hacking: Denial of Service
  3. Ethical Hacking: Introduction to Ethical Hacking
  4. Learning Subnetting
  5. Wireshark Essential Training
  6. Wireshark: Functionality
  7. Learning Ansible
  8. Learning Jenkins
  9. Learning Docker
  10. Lean Technology Strategy: Building High-Performing Teams
  11. Lean Technology Strategy: Starting Your Business Transformation
  12. Lean Technology Strategy: Running Agile at Scale
  13. Lean Technology Strategy: Moving Fast With Defined Constraints
  14. DevSecOps: Building a Secure Continuous Delivery Pipeline
  15. DevSecOps: Automated Security Testing
  16. DevOps Foundations: Monitoring and Observability
  17. Learning the Elastic Stack
  18. Learning Nagios
  19. Graphite and Grafana: Visualizing Application Performance
  20. Kubernetes: Cloud Native Ecosystem
  21. Kubernetes: Microservices
  22. Transitioning from Individual Contributor to Manager
  23. Leading Productive Meetings
  24. Coaching and Developing Employees
  25. Performance Management: Setting Goals and Managing Performance
  26. Performance Management: Conducting Performance Reviews
  27. Balancing Multiple Roles as a Leader
  28. Project Management: Preventing Scope Creep
  29. Continuous Integration: Tools
  30. Mindfulness Practices
  31. Management Tips
  32. Time Management Tips
  33. Chief Technology Officer Career Guide
  34. Managing Stress
  35. Handling Workplace Bullying
  36. What To Do When You Are Bullied at Work
  37. Learning to Be Assertive
  38. Problem Solving Techniques

Micro Courses CANCELLED

  1. Project Management Professional (PMP) – PMI
  2. Practical Project Management
  3. Transition to Project Management
  4. Risk Management Framework
  5. Incident Management
  6. Introduction to General Data Protections
  7. Risk Management

Since I wasn’t satisfied with the video quality of some of the contents I decided to dismiss the whole repository and move on.

Publish Ebooks 100%

  1. Stage #3 Web Performance
  2. Stage #3 IT Metrics

Pet Projects 50%

  1. Stage #3 WScore 50%
  2. Stage #3 AmIFrom.EU 50%

WScore was a useful tool to provide insights on the website’s health. It could give you a great overview of how your site was performing. It included Dashboard, Trends & Reports, Full Domain Monitoring & Alerting, Google LightHouse Recommendations, Events Tracking, Uptime Monitoring and Real User Monitoring (RUM). And many more were to come, but not anymore since we dropped the project because my partner and I didn’t have much time and money to invest at that moment.
AmIFrom.EU is a simple tool that tells you whether a user is from the EU, this could be useful for any GDPR implementation you need to do on your systems.

Write Blog Posts 18%

  • Achieved:
    1. What kind of shaped professional are you?
    2. Practical Estimates
  • Not Achieved (since stage #3):
    1. 10x programmer !
    2. Being solution rather than problem focused !
    3. DXpertise postmortem !
    4. Get three things done before noon !
    5. Rolling Wave Forecast !
    6. RTS (Running Tested Stories) !
    7. Separate estimating from committing !
    8. Slicing heuristic !
    9. What’s exactly the velocity, and how fast should we be? !

Upwork Tests 22%

Next Year

I’ll keep doing the same kind of planning, with few adjustments.

As a brief outline, this would be my 2020:

  • Focus on less technical books
  • Obtain the postponed certifications
  • Watch more video contents rather than other media types
  • Do (bi)weekly code challenges
  • Write ~30 blog posts

Let’s see how it turns out. Stay tuned 😉

# #