January 20, 2013 Success, YearPlanReport 2 comments
What I have done in 2012
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.
Overview of 2012
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.
Plan completeness
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.
- Dubno–Rivne–Luts’k (still Ukraine)
- Vienna (dozen of posts on our life in this beautiful city here)
- Baden (Austria)
- Graz (Austria)
- Alps
- Linz (Austria)
- Venice (Italy)
- Berlin (Germany)
- Whole week of Greece: start with Athens and continue to Kreta island beaches and adventures.
- Bratislava (Slovakia)
- More of awesome Alps, including ice cave and astonishing Hallstatt and Liechtensteinklamm
- Amsterdam (Holland)
- Brussels and Brugge (Belgium)
- Paris (France)
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.
More to come
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!
My First Presentation in a New Company
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.
Book Review: “First Things First” and surrounding thoughts
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.
My book on design patterns is released
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.
Where Do You Want to Be In a Year?
January 21, 2012 Success, YearPlanReport 7 comments
Dear Reader,
This is continuation of my year plan/report thread. I had similar plan for 2010 and for 2011. Completion of 2010 list was almost 100% successful, and completion of 2011 was much difficult and not so successful, but 2011 brought many life turning events and decisions.
I’m frustrated to admit that my head doesn’t carry this phrase all the time:
Remember, life is limited in time, so if I don’t move in the right direction I will waste it entirely.
Here below is my resolution list for 2012
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Buy a car in Europe (some used German car)
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Travel though major cities in Austria (Vienna, Salzburg, Linz, Graz, Innsbruck, Bregenz, Eisenstadt, Klagenfurt)
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Sport activities (have two-three summer hikes into the Alps & ski in the Alps)
-
Learn German for at A2 level (which is elementary)
-
Improve English and rich C1 level (which is advanced)
-
Show kick-ass performance at work
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Get promotion (or get clear idea on career opportunities, if not possible)
-
In Vienna find local .net community (user group, whatsoever) and join
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Visit TechEd Europe or NDC2012 (if possible because of budged considerations)
-
Have new friends in Austria, who share same opinions
-
Write couple of WP7 applications and post them to marketplace
-
Write couple of Win8Metro applications for fun
-
Release “Design Patterns” Book – I have 1 month to do so
-
Read 15 books (see my LinkedIn reading list)
-
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)
-
Discipline myself to get up at some certain time
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Have more public visibility and community impact – my way to MVP
My next annual report should contain evidence in facts to prove completion of above resolution. This resolution is bit smaller than 2011’s one, but as reality shows it should be more achievable because of this.
Please share your year resolution list! I will read with pleasure.
What I have done in 2011
January 12, 2012 Revision of my activity, Success, YearPlanReport 1 comment
Looking back at my “Where do you want to be in a year?” blog post for the Jan 9, 2011, I regret that I did not do many things I planned, but I’m also proud about many things I did, because many of them are not small ones, but rather life changing, like marriage and moving to other country.
Overview of 2011
At the beginning of the year I continued passing my MS exams, which seemed somewhat important and very valuable for me at that moment, also I enjoyed end of winter spending many days at skiing hills in mountains. Near that time me with girlfriend decided to let our parents know our decision about future marriage in summer. They started to be in rush, but not me – at the beginning of sprint I had been thinking more about choosing my first car, which I successfully bought for 7000$. It is used Chevrolet Aveo 2005 of fully equipped, except it has manual transmission. At the day I bought car I did not have place to live in Lviv – me with best friend where looking for new apartment to rent, because of crazy and alcoholic owner of apartment, we rented before.
My blog did not go well previous year. There are couple of months without blog posts. One of them is July. It was very hot month – I got married on 16th of July and while still having vacation we went to Europe trip to see Hungary, Austria and Switzerland the most.
Besides of Europe trip we with my wife visited really many places in Western Ukraine. Now we had car, so travelling was more quick and spontaneous.
By coincidence I was asked if I’m not interested to pass interview and relocate to other country just before my marriage. It went well and I was asked for other interview which by great coincidence was on-site in Austria when I was there with my wife. She was admiring Belvedere in Vienna, while I had my 1,5 hour interview. So in August I got an offer and accepted it. But as it is relocation to other country it involves lot of paper work to get work permit there, and took almost half a year to get approval.
This year also brought more responsibility for me at work, I had much of Technical Leader responsibilities & activities. I think that I worked in the most amazing and truly collaborative team from all of those I had chance to work in. We worked on WP7 project and challenging Silverlight project. I left those guys just before the winter, hoping to have few weeks of rest before final approval and relocation to Austria.
Before the New Year of 2011 I didn’t get approval so my “vacation” took longer, but I spent it reading a lot, sleeping even more, doing some pet coding and getting extremely lazy. To summarize: you won’t enjoy being unemployed for longer than month, not because of the money, but because of lacking social relations and absence of external challenges.
Was 2011 going according to my year plan?
See plan here.
– Release awesome free Design Patterns book in Ukrainian
I failed to do this in 2011, but I composed book, sent it to people willing to review its raw unedited version. As for now I have 5 our 25 responses on book. I’m going to create small web site for book and publish it there.
– Enterprise certification (finishing with 565 exam, very likely till the end of Winter)
I passed exam and got MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer at the beginning of the year.
– Learn to ski & swim well (I can both, but I want to be good at that)
I’m now above intermediate in skiing, but this is subjective view. Fact is that I can handle most difficult hills in Ukraine, like trostian on picture below and “black” trails in bukovel, can do basic ski-jumps and ski backwards.
As of swimming I did complete fail as I’ve been in water only 2 times during the year.
– Show kick-ass performance at work
I did not get official promotion, but I played role of Technical Leader, coded a lot and tried to show best of myself. I think I did great and could have done even better. Leaving this job was not an easy thing to do. I think SS is great Ukrainian company.
– Learn WP7 and Silverlight
Whole year I did coding for WP7 and out of browser application in Silverlight. Also with my friends won at Hackathon event, where we created small game for the WP7.
I also introduced weekly discussions around reading “Silverlight in Action” in my team.
– Start working on some “real” book (just collecting ideas on book)
As of now I don’t have any clear idea on “real” book. But the more I think on this matter the more I’m close to something on the edge of technology and people collaboration.
– Read 24 books (this year I will definitely hit this score)
Let’s count: 5 in reviews on blog, 4 more read, but no posts on blog yet. And also 5 in progress, 4 of which are almost read. (I tried hard to read as much as I can before New Year and that lead to 5 in progress).
In total it looks like not more that 13 books, which is even less than previous year report (15). Seems one book a month is my pace.
“Take quick look behind to analyze, don’t stop, think positively, go forward!” – I said to myself on this subject.
– Marriage (yeah, this really is in the list “OMG” I’m saying to myself…)
It is one of the things I’m proud about. Despite this world’s shifted mind I think that two can get married in their twenties and be happy for many years. I was really surprised by marriage statistics in Western countries. For example this statistics show that less people are getting married and along more are getting divorced. And this shows that my country is also at the top of divorce list. Too much about that crap.
Here we are:
And here are more of those photos at Picasa:
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| Wedding-Preview-900px-2 |
I’m extremely glad that I have so cute and smart wife. Just after marriage we travelled even more than before it. We have been enjoying each moment of being together.
Before I left work, we had been living in separate apartment not far from my friend and team-mate. Each day she prepared awesome breakfast and lunch to take to work. Then I picked up Taras and drove to work. It was routine, but it was great.
– Travel abroad (I’m planning for Europe tourist tour)
I had awesome week travelling though Europe after my wedding. See photos:
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| 2011.07.23-29.Europe.Trip.Honey.Week |
– Learn one more programming language (probably everyone heard about learning one language per year, why not?)
I read bits about Haskell and tried F#, but I’m not satisfied with my progress. So will have another try in 2012.
– Frequent dev meetings (this is hard, because preparing takes lot of time for me)
I did probably very few so called “developer’s meetings”, one of which was even paid. Despite this I introduced technical status meeting for my team in addition to scrum standup.
Karpaty alpinism (again health stuff, want to do this with my girlfriend)
We took Hoverla – the highest mountain in Ukraine:
Read complete story and see photos at my wife’s blog here.
– Became known presenter (couple of outside the company presentations)
– English (watch films, find guys to talk in English)
For anything of video I watched myself I preferred English. Which of course didn’t work for cinema where I go with wife and friends. Also I had to watch amazing “The Big Bang Theory” translated, but some series watched with pleasure in English.
And what is funny now I’m learning German :).
– Start coffee-and-code in Lviv
Fail. I thought about this many times and always lacked confidence in my social skills to do this. Probably it can be as easy as mentioning on blog and in twitter something like “Hey, guys! Tomorrow I will be in the XYZ coffee shop doing some coding. Come along and join.”
– Write couple of personal-small programming projects / contribute to open-source
Not much here – dozen of try-it-out projects, small open-source orm system CustomORM, wp7 project we wrote at Hackathon and maybe 3 wp7 i-started-it-and-left projects, ah and few competition type projects at TopCoder.
– Visit one of the solid conferences
I visited couple of conferences like Uneta Plus and Mobile Professional Days in Kharkiv, and of course many events here in Lviv like LvivIT and regular Lviv User Group events.
– Get money machine / some ideas / investments / whatever
I haven’t invented anything better than deposit accounts, which now don’t work that good as if they worked in 2009 while crisis. Month interest income is enough for one full tank of my car, which usually runs out in 1-1,5 weeks.
– Start some business even small and crappy – but have it to learn
Fail. And even more – complete fail. I didn’t even think about this much. But from other point of view, there must be something exciting me to start with and I haven’t found anything like this. At least I’m happy that I will be eligible to have wp7 developer account in Austria.
Became better-and-better in planning and achieving, continue growing, etc, etc…
Subjective. Isn’t it? I think I did great with this one, but you decide. I move into embrace of 2012 year which will definitely bring me lot of nice surprises, emotions and great time.
My talk at #kievaltnet about NHibernate internals
December 4, 2011 Conferences, NHibernate, Presentation, Success 2 comments
Friday I’ve been in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. At the beginning of the day me with my wife visited couple of shops to buy some special things my wife makes. And than we went to have a good sit in small restaurant till 7 PM. I had to finish up my presentation…
Recently I’ve mentioned that I will be speaking at Kiev ALT.NET. So this post is about it.
Kiev ALT.NET
Kiev ALT.NET is great group of smart people willing to learn interesting things in .net but maybe from deeper standpoint than standard .net user groups do. I’ve been having good conversations in twitter with @chaliy and once we met at UnetaPlus in Kharkiv where he invited me as speaker to the @kievaltnet. Peliminary we agreed on something about NHibernate.
The topic
I knew that I have to prepare something interesting on NHibernate. But what? There are dozen of articles on it, there are many videos available. Topic just came itself. You might know that I’ve been working with NH for long time already and that I’ve written something similar to ORM so I decided that getting some insight into NHibernate’s guts would be really interesting.
Presentation delivery
So before 7 PM I got to the Ciklum office (building on the left). Landscapes from the 20th floor are astonishing, especially at night.
Not sure if I was enough prepared, but at least I felt that guys were listening to me very-very attentively. Some of them twitted simultaneously (@alexbeletsky, @skalinets, @korneliuk) and had good laugh. At least I invented term “swiss breakpoint” (aka. conditional breakpoint with cross).
Also I tried to joke much, but it didn’t go as well as I expected it to, guess because of sleepless night and general tiredness. Also I spoke with accent (as per them o_O. Never thought I have any kind of accent of my native language).
Presentation itself
View more presentations from Andriy Buday.
I would like to thank all guys, who came to listen to me and other presenters. Thanks for having me at Kiev ALT.NET. It had been great time and I would like to be there once again despite reason (to speak or to listen).
Hackathon “WP7 Rocks!” – we won
November 1, 2011 Success, WP7 6 comments
I would like to share some of my experience and impressions of taking part in “Windows Phone 7 Rocks!” Hackathon in Lviv.
An amazing event
First of all, many thanks to the organizers of this event and to the sponsors. Event was really great. Everyone got presents, food and joy of playing kinect at free time and of course tons of intensive coding. Hackathon started with helpful and resourceful presentations delivered by organizers. Two of them were about stuff I think wp7 developer must know – metro design and publishing to marketplace. And I would like to correct myself by replacing “developer” with “Ukrainian developer”, thing is, it is not easy for my country to be appreciated by Microsoft. Other two were about working with data in Mango and augmented reality. Ah.. and forgot to mention that everyone got styling wp7 t-shirt, finally I’ve got one! Awesome!
Hackathon is programming, team, fun and creativity
I hardly remember any other day when I had such intensive programming time. Not to say that I didn’t have sleepless all-night coding, but I was somewhat relaxed, making tea time to time surfing internet when realizing that copy-paste is no longer working. It was different, it was team play.
As you may know at the moment I work on enterprise WP7 project and my team has 8 developers. 6 of us took part in the Hackathon which formed 2 Hackathon teams. I cannot express well enough how much this night made us more closer to each other and how extreme team-building it was. But I strongly ensure you that it worth each minute we spent together coding two great ideas to be presented next day. During the night we did 125 commits to the source-control (4:59PM first commit and 11:22AM last commit). Can you imagine such productivity of the hired people? Never. Of course no one can work such intensive for long time.
So here we are:
6 most closest people. Sorry for two of them not looking at you and for me also – I’m busy.
On Monday our scrum master sent congratulation to us and here is how it looks like:
Hold on for a second. Winners? Yeap! But wait for a second. First things first.
Applications developed
At the moment there are no presentations available in the internet or video, so I cannot say much about other teams. Hopefully I will update this blog post soon. But I can remember many great applications developed by others, such as handy cartoon-creator, quest generator and player, travel places logger, guitar tuner, ball game, and many other nice applications. 3 of us created “real-problem” solving application – “WC Emergency”, which by it’s idea exploded auditory: when you really have “need”, you start app and answer 2 basic questions “How long can you wait?” and “How fast can you run?” after which you get the most reachable WC. Some other team even managed to create 3D game, to the last moment I thought they will take first place. For the complexity they probably deserve first place, but…
Winners!
We managed to create something more exciting. We invented pure FUN. So other 3 of us created mini-game “Face 2 Face”. Splashscreen below:
After which you get selection for the single player or multiplayer mode:
For the single player you can play with blue-red balls or can load images instead of blue or read ones. Here single player simple mode:
Idea is simple – you keep friends on the battle-field and throw enemies out of it. Physics for two-kinds is different, I will keep it in secret.
But joy begins whey you selected multiplayer, took pictures for your team (faces cropped) here:
Found other guy willing to play with you. He takes pictures for his team on his phone (!). Game starts and you both have all pictures. You throw his guys and keep yours, he does the same for his team.
That angry bomb also has something to do with the game, but it is secret.
I think me and Taras managed to impress people when we started taking photos of them and playing with those in front of the auditory. Great that we had server-side coverage by Roman.
I bet this gave us new emotions and inspiration for the future. We also got HTC Mozart phone as present.
Thanks
Everyone was really pleased and despite those sleepless-red-eye-faces it was clearly seen that no one was disappointed of spending 24h non-stop coding.
Mine time management = pomodoro + outlook + notepad + paper
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.
So what do I recommend to make it happen?
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.
And here is what I think works for me
Paper notebooks
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.
Plan Of Attack
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.
Outlook
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.
Pomodoro technique
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).
Free time which is never free
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.
Spend time wisely
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.
Key things to the whole damn time management:
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Every thought or task is documented, so your mind if free to do what it is intended to do at the moment
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Have time to reorganize tasks and plan them
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Be maximum focused on tasks you do at the moment
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Have time to relax and think about things you do and will do in future
Thank you very much for reading this blog post, looking forward to hear feedbacks from you.
I’m MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer 3.5
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.
