Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 6
Status
Day 7: I am attending the Kansas City Developer Conference today. The first day was really great. I learned quite a bit from the sessions and it was nice to talk with all the sponsors and the people they had representing them at the conference.
For those reading this post who haven’t read WHY I’m blogging about these 7 habits, hop over to the challenge post where I describe what I’m trying to do.
Habit 1: Be Proactive
I took the opportunity to attend some sessions where the topic was something outside of my field. I think it is important to understand as much as possible about a multitude of topics and schools of thought because they all seem to come back together.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
Tough one…I took notes of what I thought were key points from each session in order to remember what I could share with our team.
Habit 3: Put first things first
I took myself for a long run today. It hurt.
Habit 4: Think win-win
At the conference I connected with a couple of booths that I felt like I may have something to share. We discussed a couple of topics that we could work on presenting to a user group.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
I talked to a college senior about career paths and choices. I focused on understanding what his goals were and what type of career he wanted before I gave any advice.
Habit 6: Synergize
In my conversations with people that I met a the conference we talked about how we could team up to present a couple topics to a user group.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw
I spent my day at Kansas City Developer Conference attending sessions that provided a new perspective on how we develop software and improve our skill of the craft.
The video
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Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 6
Status
Day 6: I’m looking forward to my day tomorrow because I am attending the Kansas City Developer Conference. I enjoy these conferences because it lets me get out of my daily routine and hear new schools of thought.
For those reading this post who haven’t read WHY I’m blogging about these 7 habits, hop over to the challenge post where I describe what I’m trying to do.
Habit 1: Be Proactive
I reached out to my manager to get approval for the dev conference tomorrow. I had to consider what questions she may have beforehand and ensure I could support the request by showing how attendance grows myself and how that benefits our team.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
I took a lot of time yesterday to work on our automation stories. Automation, or lack thereof, has been one of the biggest issues on our team. Working through the stories to get them ready for development will make it much easier to tackle our automation goals.
Habit 3: Put first things first
Today my first priority was getting ready for an upcoming weekend deployment. Unfortunately, deployments are not yet automated and require quite a bit of time. I went through my checklist and started making sure everything was in order for the weekend activities.
Habit 4: Think win-win
I spent some time doing a code review during the day when I knew I had other things that had to be done. During the code review we found a couple of changes that could have adverse affects on the system and were able to remediate the errors. I got to learn more about this specific component of the application and ensure that our changes would integrate with the system.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
I spent a large amount of time today working out user stories for the future. Most of my time was spent breaking down how we’ll accomplish goals that we’ve set for ourselves.
Habit 6: Synergize
Working together on a code review helped a few of us team members grow.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw
I again spent more time working on an AWS Lambda project that features a server-less architecture. More details to come.
The video
If this article inspired you, show support FightMediocrity by subscribing to their channel.
Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 5
Status
Day 5: I’m finding it more and more difficult to come up with examples for the habits in my daily life. I am keeping them in the front of my mind as I go through my day, but when i sit down to write this post it becomes difficult.
I make a conscious attempt to describe a new situation each day rather than repeating examples from other posts.
For those reading this post who haven’t read WHY I’m blogging about these 7 habits, hop over to the challenge post where I describe what I’m trying to do.
Habit 1: Be Proactive
Today I took a pro-active approach to verify everything was ready for an upcoming deployment. This included ensuring we had a deployment checklist and all parties were aware of their tasks.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
We have a large backlog of automation stories that we want to prioritize for upcoming sprints. I took some time today to comb through them and help flush some key stories out. It won’t be enough to call each ready for development, but it’ll help the team understand what is required.
Habit 3: Put first things first
I’ve declared in earlier posts that I want to be remembered as a loving, caring husband and father. I know that in order to do that I need to be in the best health possible so I can be here for my family.
I’ve been focusing on eating healthier and getting more exercise on a daily basis.
Habit 4: Think win-win
I’ve been working with some team members to cross train in other technical areas. The benefits go both ways, I get to learn more about certain technologies and they get the experience of teaching others.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Working with a team member today I did not understand a particular situation that came up. Rather than reacting based on how I interpreted the situation, I re-asked a couple questions in order to fully understand the request. Once I understood what was being asked of me then I was ready to address the situation.
Habit 6: Synergize
Many times in our work we end up in a situation where the team has to work together in order to solve issues. It never fails that the collective knowledge and experience assists with these issues. I can’t imagine how one person could handle everything.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw
I continued work on developing a ‘server-less’ application using AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway. This project is something I’m doing to gain familiarity with these AWS tools and best-practices in developing a server-less architecture.
The video
If this article inspired you, show support FightMediocrity by subscribing to their channel.
Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 4
Status
Day 4: The past couple posts have been focused mainly on how I’ve handled each of these habits in my home life. I’m happy to be writing today about how I’ve applied each of the 7 habits I’ve identified in my work life.
For those reading this post who haven’t read WHY I’m blogging about these 7 habits, hop over to the challenge post where I describe what I’m trying to do.
Habit 1: Be Proactive
There were a couple of items pertaining to technical debt at work today that had to be taken care of. Our team practices Agile development, particularly Scrum. I had some free time this sprint and our team was in a good place as far as completing all our sprint work so I decided to tackle a couple of our technical debt issues.
It felt good to clean up some of our lingering issues.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind
The technical debt work I started working on today (see Habit 1) is a task that isn’t possible to complete in a day or even a week. As I started to break out tasks on what could be done I laid out a plan on how we, as a team, can begin to tackle our technical debt and work towards creating less and less of it.
I know it will be a process, but every journey beings with a first step.
Habit 3: Put first things first
I’ve declared in earlier posts that I want to be remembered as a loving, caring husband and father. I know that in order to do that I need to be in the best health possible so I can be here for my family.
I had a lot of things that I needed to get done at work but I took some time to go to a follow-up Doctor appointment.
Habit 4: Think win-win
The chair of my bachelors degree program and my Senior Project Advisor reached out to me regarding my Senior Project. The project was a web application that allows genetic researchers to publish their findings for other researchers to review.
He reached out to be because he had migrated hosting providers and was having trouble getting the web application back up. I requested access to the server and took about an hour or so to take care of some configuration issues that were missed in the application migration.
I win because my project is still live online from 2014 and my advisor can continue to provide the services to researchers.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood
At work we discussed a few issues were were seeing in our prod-like environments. I noticed a couple errors that I’ve come across in the past and I knew the fixes. I took a step back on the issues and we worked together as a team to understand the issue and resolve it.
Taking this approach helped other team members learn about our configuration and get a better grasp of how debugging works in our specialized environments.
Habit 6: Synergize
I spent quite a bit of time working with others on my team today towards our release goal. We have been working on this release for the past few months and we are ready to see it though to the end.
Like most teams, it takes the whole team to accomplish a large goal. I’m proud to be on a team that feels more like a family.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw
Before leaving for my Doctor appointment I spent some time brushing up on on a few AWS service offerings. I’m looking to build a few tools and wanted to do some research on what I could leverage from AWS.
The video
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Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 3
Status
Day 3: Today is Fathers Day and officially my 1st Fathers Day (I have a kitty that gets me a card each year). I found myself thinking a lot about the future and making sure I’m going to be a part of my families future for as long as possible. I realized there were steps I could take to
Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 2
Status
Day 2: I’m excited about the way I’ve been thinking about things. I seem to always have the 7 habits in mind when I’m considering anything. I haven’t really explained what I’m doing to those around me
Continuous Self Improvement Challenge - Day 1
Status
Day 1: I’m glad to be able to keep up with this challenge on the first day. I’m excited and already thinking about all the ways I can describe how I accomplish each of these goals.
It seems that I already have these habits circulating around my brain whenever I’m talking with someone or considering a couple of different options. I’m looking forward to what the next 17 days brings
Continuous Self Improvement Challenge
Inspiration
I watched THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE BY STEPHEN COVEY - ANIMATED BOOK REVIEW presented by FightMediocrity on YouTube this morning and I felt inspired. In general, I hear that habits take 18 days to form, give or take depending on your source.
I’m going to take a set of Habits I want to focus on and repeat them for 18 days, documenting
