A new year! I love the clean slate! A good opportunity to reflect on the past, present and future.
Past
Professionally speaking, last year might well have been my best year yet. Definitely in terms of exposure – not just for me but also for sipgate. I used to read about Spotify, Jimdo and other great places to work thinking “We do these things, too! We are just as great a place to work at! Why does nobody ever mention us?”
I mean, Olaf Lewitz said on Twitter that sipgate is
the most agile company I know
He knows us because we’ve had the privilege to work with him several times. I’d like for others to know, too. Consequently I’ve never spoken at that many conferences before. With these and other efforts in 2015 we have started to slowly but surely put ourselves on the map. 2016 is gonna be even better because several of my colleagues are preparing talks about topics, such as how we implemented and work with our Pattern Library, how we migrated a core system in teeny-tiny steps, or how we reached continuous delivery. I can’t wait to see those!
Privately it’s been a mixed year. It’s my first whole year as a mom and time is even dearer than it was before. I once read that as a parent you can have exactly one hobby. It’s true for me and the hobby I picked were Retromat, Wall-Skills & this blog. Those of you who can count might spot a slight problem there, and yes, 3 is too much on top of a full-time job and family. I’ve had more sick days this year than all sick days prior to 2015 combined – with a wide margin! To illustrate: I did my first keynote. Should have been a stellar moment for me. And it was. But I’ve also rarely been more ill than at that point in time.
Apparently the first year of kindergarten is hell for parents. Your child is building up it’s immune system and is constantly sick. And you along with it. For us it culminated in all three of being more or less ill for all of December. Yay. Not.
For the record, I wouldn’t trade. The little one is amazing and I love her so very much! I’m just not used to being sick all the time.
Present & Future
That aside, my body tells me very clearly that I can’t keep up the pace I set in 2015. Especially, without doing any sports at all. That’s why I bought a bike and will cycle to work this year. Unfortunately my tram commute was my only quiet “me time” in which I wrote all blog posts and most of the Wall-Skills 1-pagers. Not sure how much I can get done in evenings. Posting 2 times a week is definitely out of scope. I’d consider 1 blog post per week a great success. And maybe 1 Wall-Skills 1-pager per month? Plus, the 2 books I’d like to create … Focus! I need more focus.
Or more time. I’d love to be able to take 1 week of unpaid leave several times a year so that I can burst-work on a project: Create 5 1-pagers. Write 50 pages. A new project that strikes my fancy. (I’m still toying with the idea of actually producing these.) Useful stuff like this 🙂
It would be much easier to do, if the time taken off paid for itself in some way. As much as I hate the word “monetization”, it would make things easier. The Wall-Skills collections are a step into that direction. The websites will always stay free!
At work I will have to face the fact that I am not a very good developer. At the end of the day I’m always more interested in the human side of tech and invest my time there. Time to find new role inside sipgate that’s a better fit. It’s gonna be fun figuring that out 🙂