January 20, 2013 Success, YearPlanReport 2 comments
January 20, 2013 Success, YearPlanReport 2 comments
I tend to have very ambitious plans and even realizing this I never regret because I believe that the higher you mark the higher you are going to reach. Of course there is some frustration and dissatisfaction when it is time for a review. If it is the case for you just neglect all bad and continue looking forward. Life is too short to spoil it with negative emotions. I visited so many places in the past year I wouldn’t believe if you told me this year before. Great and deep feelings of pleasant moments travelling somewhere in Europe together with my wife is the best thing taken from passed year. I hardly remember last piece of code I worked on, but I clearly see golden sun smoothly going down on the beach of Falassarna.
At the beginning of 2012 my life was about to change much once again. I changed my job, but this time it also meant change of a country. While we were finishing relocation paper work I tried to enjoy last month of being unemployed. I went skiing many times and slept well. Besides I released my e-book on design patterns.
Suddenly we appeared in Austria. Here is picture of me in front of my company’s logo at first day of our arrival:
Finding an apartment was a first challenge. After overcoming it and few others we almost stopped worrying. Starting in a completely different country and company with different mindset was extremely interesting and exciting.
After some acclimatization me and wife started to travel. Leveraging Schengen Area we really travelled a lot, I even did not expect that much. You will find complete list later on.
My professional life though did not thrive much in the past year. For sure I’ve improved my skills in many areas. For example my English has improved and a lot of new working experience was gained. I also learned some new to me approaches of delivering software and understood a lot about new company setup and its product available and used by millions. Additionally I introduced myself to few programming languages and did some pet programming.
Year ended with long vacation back in Ukraine together with my parents, friends and relatives. I wish I could be in many places at the same time.
Now lets look at each of the items I planned year ago in my 2012 “Where do you want to be in a Year?”.
– Buy a car in Europe (some used German car)
Car is a whole separate topic. Turns out that keeping car in Europe is quite expensive. Just mandatory insurance costs close to 100 Euro each month. Of course it depends on car size and your driving experience and can be much decreased if you willing to drive Matiz while having 9 years driving background.
I didn’t buy a car in 2012 for myself, but I bought people carrier for my father. It was first time I really leveraged from duty fee. 20% of taxes were returned when I brought back confirmation of exporting car out of EU. Well registering car in Ukraine is tough task and I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with it.
In addition I now hold Austrian driving license and proud to state that I passed an exam with my first try. It might sound ridiculous, but many friends I know here didn’t pass exam immediately, even they had some experience from Ukraine. Even 3 other fellows who tried to pass exam same day with me have failed. One try costs 130, printed license costs 90 and medical check 35. Total 225 euro just to get license if you already hold one from other country. If you want to pass it from scratch it would cost around 1,3K.
If you do the math, renting car is by far more cheaper and preferable over owning one if you only have some weekend trips time-to-time. Unfortunately I cannot drive to Ukraine by hired car. This year I drove Hyundai i40, Hyundai Accent, Opel Corsa, Opel Astra. As of not rented I drove Hyundai i20, Fiat Scudo carrying twice as many people as in normal car and finally I had a chance to drive my Chevrolet before I sold it. I think I like driving.
– Travel though major cities in Austria (Vienna, Salzburg, Linz, Graz, Innsbruck, Bregenz, Eisenstadt, Klagenfurt)
It would be a titanic work to write about all places we visited with my wife during passed 2012 year, but thanks to her there is report on each of our travel. Below is list in chronological order with links to her blog.
I won’t start commenting on those above, because it would take ages. If you can read Ukrainian you have all stories there, otherwise just see some pictures.
– Sport activities (have two-three summer hikes into the Alps & ski in the Alps)
I don’t have a bike. But you can ride one completely free of charge here in Vienna. You just register with your credit card and whenever you use bike less than 1 hour you are not charged. Me and wife used this to spend many summer days with joy and benefit for health. We also had one hike in Alps Reichenau an der Rax. So far I went skiing only once and not in so distant Alps. Want to ski in some “real” Alps.
Generally I’m not completely satisfied with completeness of this point. But environment in Austria is more suitable for active life. People ride, run, walk really lot in dozen of parks.
– Learn German for at A2 level (which is elementary)
Ich glaube meine Deutsch ist noch zu schlecht. I attended one intensive course and also joined language courses offered by my company. Placement test reckons me for A2 level. I doubt it being even close to truth, but I will continue with German in 2013.
– Improve English and rich C1 level (which is advanced)
Probably C1 is pre-advance. For sure I’ve improved my English. Online estimation gives me 7.7K known words versus 4.9K in the beginning of the year. But dictionary is very small portion of what can be considered as proficiency in a language. Fluency in speech is very important. Everyday work in English-speaking environment is a great advantage.
I have extensive blog post on languages I use here in Austria, called “Існує die Frage of Language. Или нет?”.
– Show kick-ass performance at work
For sure I performed really well. Many of my skills were noticed and acknowledged, especially technical ones. On the other hand I’m still lacking in self-confidence and communication skills and maybe some other soft skills. There is already one conference I’m going to visit to improve some of those. But I also doubt that I’m so bad in such things, as I have already been in role of tech lead and it was quite smooth. I think I need more time and motivation which is melting in new company.
– Get promotion (or get clear idea on career opportunities, if not possible)
I think I now have much better idea on career opportunities and raises. It is completely out of synch with what I expected when I just started. Have you seen films in which guys work years to get any promotion meanwhile fighting with others to be pick number one. Of course it is not that severe as in movies, but there are many factors which make it closer to movies than to Ukrainian IT reality.
– In Vienna find local .net community (user group, whatsoever) and join
As per me .NET user group here is marketing driven and besides is held in German so not something I can join easily, at least not for first years. Overall IT market is rather small here.
– Visit TechEd Europe or NDC2012 (if possible because of budged considerations)
I’m too greedy to spend almost 2K euro on conference while videos can be downloaded later. It is exactly what I did. Watched dozen of those. Though I visited small conference kindly offered by company.
– Have new friends in Austria, who share same opinions
Many new friends, but I wouldn’t say that I have any Austrian as my real friend. Also by “same opinions” I largely meant interest in technical topics. It is even worse with that. I tried code and beer session and it didn’t go well. I hope it is just matter of time.
– Write couple of WP7 applications and post them to marketplace
Nothing in marketplace. Played a bit with couple of ideas, but gave up. Not sure I still want to do this. I wrote couple of Win8Metro applications for fun and also gave up. It would be not fair to say that I competed this point.
– Release “Design Patterns” Book – I have 1 month to do so
I’m happy to know that I didn’t leave Ukrainian IT without any of my contribution.
Book has been released and is available on its web site.
– Read 15 books (see my LinkedIn reading list)
I read 7 books and have way too many in progress. Us usual there are Book Reviews on my blog.
– Learn programming language(s). I will start with “7 languages in 7 weeks” and then pick up one for deeper insight (not compulsory from book)
This year I tried many programming languages. Here are my posts on each of the languages from the book:
– Discipline myself to get up at some certain time
We have daily standup meeting at 10:30 so it forces me to be up at latest at 10AM. I cannot say that I failed with this, but also not completely what I wanted.
– Have more public visibility and community impact
This year I had drastically much less public visibility than year before.
I’m planning to have blog post on working experience here in Austria in general and in comparison with Ukraine as it could be very interesting for many of you.
Next year is promising to be life changing once again!
August 5, 2012 DevMeeting, Presentation, Success 2 comments
A long time passed since I’ve delivered a technical presentation. Mainly because I now live in another country and establishing myself in a new company.
Well “establishing” is loudly said. I’m just software developer. Probably it worth to write separate post on my experiences in this company, since it is very much different from one I worked in Ukraine and I’m sure from most other companies there. I think I had much better perspectives as speaker before I moved (at least those short-term perspectives).
I talked about OData protocol, starting with introduction (read blog posts OData and OData service with WCF and data in memory) and finishing with its applicability to a project we do. Thanks to this presentation I crossed some imaginary mental barrier to more frequent presentations and sharing knowledge, something that I like, and something that I started to take solid steps back in Ukraine.
Now I’m starting it from the beginning.
Presentation I delivered was rather not official and only team wide. It was first I ever delivered in English, so I was limited in number of language tricks which I can use, and probably it impacted quality. Also I didn’t want to make it look like I’m smart-ass, thus I used pace and tone of a normal working meeting. Well, to be honest, I even didn’t know how to behave in this new environment. But from what I see guys liked my presentation, so this gives me a bright spark of enthusiasm to continue sharing interesting stuff.
There are few pitfalls with continuing, some of them pleasing. For example, developers here on average are more experienced and it would be more difficult to surprise them with something. It means that I would need to prepare more in depth topics, which of course requires more time to prepare. But, in the end, it is great that I work with more experienced programmers than me. On the other hand, I’m afraid that most of guys I know here are not willing to spend their spare time to form or join some community of software developers, and I can understand them.
Since I already mentioned about community, I have some ideas about organizing something cool here in Vienna/Austria, for foreigner developers, like me. Will blog about it soon.
April 15, 2012 Book Reviews, Success No comments
I like encouraging books. I like to be inspired by ideas that make us think we can do something to improve our lives. Despite, we all know that to change something we have to work extremely hard, usually after few attempts we give up, but never want to admit this. This is how we are built – we want to be better for less efforts.
Book “First Things First” is very good because it, unlike many other time-management books, brings to the table more dramatic and global questions of our path and purpose. Start with this: “How many people on their deathbed wish they’d spent more time at the office?”. Of course people work to make their living, but apparently working hard at work cannot be life goal itself. The goal could be to contribute to society and to your profession. I’m software developer and my goal could be to contribute to community of other guys, similar to me. Instead I catch myself on being hard-worker. I stay longer than others at work. In the end this only transforms me into Dark Matter Developer. I may get noticed at work and get better income, so I buy myself bmw z4 in few years. But, what’s the point? No happiness at home, no recognition in world of software developers and small but fast car for no kids. It is what you do, not what you own.
I never was lucky to truly embrace lot of time-management techniques. Maybe they are too difficult and take much time to get them rolling. Or maybe they are just wrong? They teach us to be effective and efficient, but usually we solve only short-term goals. Are you sure you are heading “the true north”?
From this book I will take & try one simple and great technique and would recommend you to try. Think about one thing for your personal life and one for your professional life, which would definitely improve quality of your life if you do them constantly and coherently. Ok? Just do them! Don’t concentrate on any other things… work on these two.
I have two for myself: Personal: exercise every morning. Professional: frequently blog quality posts. Though, none of them transparently represent how some aspects of life can be improved, believe me or not, I see great breakthrough, if I only do them.
Almost forgot, this should have been book review:
And it is! Thoughts provoked by book are great indicator of its quality.
Book worth to be read!
You may find my thoughts on other books I read by Book Reviews tag, many of them are also time/self-management and success oriented.
February 15, 2012 Book Reviews, Design Patterns, Success 23 comments
Dear Reader,
I’m glad to let you know, that I released my short free e-book on design patterns.
It is available on web site https://designpatterns.andriybuday.com/
As you many know early 2010 I started writing series of blog post dedicated to GoF design patterns. I tried to keep my examples of patterns very simple and in the way, that person reading example can build associations with real or close to real world situations. I also translated all of the examples into Ukrainian and then decided to assemble small e-book. And now it is available for you.
Here is some introduction in Ukrainian (I’m not translating it to English, since if you cannot read in Ukrainian there is no point).
Опис
Книга «Дизайн патерни — просто, як двері» є безплатною україномовною книгою, що містить унікальні приклади до шаблонів проектування. Завдяки своїй нестандартній подачі матеріалу вона дозволить вам легко опанувати основи розуміння дизайн патернів чи систематично і дуже швидко повторити їх перед інтерв’ю. Спосіб написання книги дозволить провести час, відведений на її прочитання, без нудьги, а подекуди навіть захоплююче.
Освіжіть у своїй пам’яті призабуті дизайн патерни!
У декількох словах
Книгу я написав із добрими намірами. Їх у мене було декілька. Я хотів упевнитися, що сам розумію усі класичні дизайн патерни. Ресурсів для цього є досить багато, але я вирішив реалізувати ці патерни самостійно та придумати власні приклади. Таким чином, починаючи із 16 січня 2010 я писав блог пости, які так чи інакше викликали зацікавлення в читачів. Щоб цей внесок в програмування був більш чітким, в мене виникло бажання випустити невеличку книжку, яка стала б колекцією цих блог постів.
Завітайте на сайт книги: http://designpatterns.andriybuday.com/
Та не забудьте подякувати автору, поширивши посилання.
January 21, 2012 Success, YearPlanReport 7 comments
January 12, 2012 Revision of my activity, Success, YearPlanReport 1 comment
Wedding-Preview-900px-2 |
2011.07.23-29.Europe.Trip.Honey.Week |
December 4, 2011 Conferences, NHibernate, Presentation, Success 2 comments
November 1, 2011 Success, WP7 6 comments
We managed to create something more exciting. We invented pure FUN. So other 3 of us created mini-game “Face 2 Face”. Splashscreen below:
June 22, 2011 Success 6 comments
Have you ever read any books on time management? I’m sure you read maybe few of them or at least read articles/blogs and of course heard a lot. Have you ever tried some time management techniques? I’m sure you tried. Have you ever failed in those tries? I guess you did. And if you did not fail, than you are probably very lucky person. I believe I have an answer why those fail, or at least failed for me. Reason is – none of particular techniques that I tried really matched my personality and my style of work. There are things that simply cannot work for you. That’s it.
Play more and more with different (!) techniques, think about them, think why they work and don’t work for you. Also try to mix them. Try to adapt what you learnt more and never be precise to what is written in the book.
I have two paper notebooks. One I always have with myself when I’m outside of the work and another is always at work. I never forget working one at home and vice-versa.
Work-notebook. Usually I write to this notebook as I go. Anything could go there – meeting minutes, my thoughts, items to work on, even some bad words if I’m not satisfied with meeting I’m attending. I would have used laptop instead, but I’m not at position/company where guys have laptops for work.
Personal-notebook. Is something where everything goes planned per each day. For example I can put there to have haircut on Friday. But I also like to list there items for the next day that are related to work, grouped by need in them. Something like “must”, “nice”, ”awesome” so in the end of the day when I take a look at it and I did everything from “must” section I’m already satisfied with my day and if I did something from “nice” or “awesome” I’m proud of myself.
I have txt file located at my working desktop called “Plan of Attack.txt”. It is very similar to what you would have called “todo.txt”, but except of writing there things I need to work on, I also put anything that could come into my mind while working on something else. For example while I was working on coding stuff X, I realized that I need to send short e-mail to customer on feature Y. Even if this e-mail could be short, instead of writing it immediately I do my “Alt+Tab” and document “e-mail on Y”, which is probably one second to do. By this process I did not lose my concentration on stuff X and I avoided stress for my memory to remember about that Y.
I utilize Outlook very much for planning stuff for the day along with applying “pomodoro” technique. This is also very interesting that I have 15-30 minutes appointments in outlook that look like “Plan of attach and e-mails”. During that time I work on my inbox and I also reorganize what I have in my magic file by simply changing order items are located in file. Those at the top have higher priority. Once I sent e-mail on Y appropriate line disappears from my list.
I try to stay maximum focused on things I do, and this is very much propagated by pomodoro technique. My outlook has 30 minutes personal appointments, I mark them as “free time”, so it shows people that they anyway can schedule meeting with me at that point of time. Also if I have to much external interruption (e.i. guys asking questions) I put a note at the paper near me with label “I’m available starting from xx:xx”. So during 25 minutes I just do my job, say “Pomodoro: Coding – Security” or “Pomodoro: E-mails”, very focused. Here is also one important note: I do not use this technique if I feel that I’m concentrated at work and have no issues with continuing what I do. I can continuously work on coding something during 2 hours and still be focused. I do not interrupt myself by these “tomatoes” if such things happen (usually at night).
I also have free spots, of course they are always occupied by something I need to help on, on short conversations with others and many other things that steal our time. But there is pros. in free spots – I can spend it on my further planning and I can go through my scribbles in notebooks and… I have time to relax.
When someone cannot be in time with task they do there are doubts if they spend their time wisely. Having this doubt can be fair and can be not. People always have different vision on what is important for other people and what is definition of “done”. Doesn’t matter how much stuff you’ve done and will do, please always know why you do everything in your life.
Thank you very much for reading this blog post, looking forward to hear feedbacks from you.
February 18, 2011 Certification, Success 3 comments
So far so good, I passed everything I planned to pass for the next 1.5 years. Take a look at the picture in career plan for software engineer blog post. I guess that I probably was afraid about learning ASP.NET. And as I passed everything sooner I can plan for more cool stuff, for instance starting my own small project or spend more time on personal life.
But here is just a little bit more on exam itself. I was ready for this exam not because of some books, training kits or anything else. It is all my experience. I extremely enjoyed passing this exam, you just apply your experience and common sense if you have it in software development of enterprise applications. Exam measures my understanding of designing application, its components, their testing, stabilizing, deployment, also choosing appropriate technologies. That is what I encounter often at work.
This is good plus to my CV and promotion strategy.
Exam 70-565: PRO: Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
I passed 70-565 exam with score 971 out of 1000. And this time exam questions just flattered to me. I liked them much. I believe that this is because they are not kind of questions where you have to know exact method signature. These are questions where you have to think and choose appropriate decision, and even more, they overlap a lot with questions I encountered in my experience.
You can see my transcript using this information:
https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx
Transcript ID: 904316
Access Code: andriybuday
Nearest certification plans
There is still one thing left. It is 4.0 .NET framework outside, not 3.5 so I’m looking for upgrade of the current certification. The best matching exam would be transition of my skills to MCPD 4.0 Windows Developer (70-521). At the moment I don’t have exact date for this exam, but it might be in 2-4 weeks.