2019 was a year full of challenges and I am happy that it is over. I use the time between the holidays to recharge my batteries so that I will be ready to tackle the changes that 2020 will bring.
With everything going on I missed my 10th anniversary of my blog graberj.wordpress.com. I started blogging in September 2009 with my first post “SVN: Commits auf Tags?” and never dreamt that it will be around for so long. So far, I wrote 195 posts there and (with this one) 200 posts here. I have a lot of ideas to blog about and hope you will find those posts useful. If you want to get an alert as soon as I post, you can use my RSS feed or the email subscription in den navigation.
My big project at work comes along well. In April we released the first parts to production and the users are very happy with it. They no longer need to wait on the application and can do their tasks without fear of losing data or corrupting the system. However, it took us far longer to reach that point than we expected. To speed things up, we needed to adjust our workflow, use automated code generation for all the simple things and reduce complexity wherever possible so that everyone on the team can understand what is going on.
We tried this new approach with the next data migration part and were surprised how well it turned out. Instead of months it only took a few weeks to get all the data into the new system. All this while sharing the knowledge with the team and producing an extensive set of acceptance tests to ensure that everything works as expected. For me this way of working and creating things together as a team means a lot. To my disappointment, not everyone saw it that way. Instead of discussing the issues openly, we had to fight a series of proxy battles. It took me too long to take the necessary actions and part with one of our suppliers – definitively the worst experience of this year.
Since then we inadvertently proven the side story about “Fred” from the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. With fewer people working tightly together, we created better solutions in higher quality and a lot faster than ever before. I hope we can keep this momentum up and transfer it over to our next projects.
With all that work I did not have much time for side projects. The big exception was the renewal of the user group website dnug-bern.ch that I do together with René and Daniel. Here we can experiment and try out all the things we have wanted to do for a long time without taking a big risk. This opportunity to learn in a small team resulted so far in 6 blog posts and will go on in 2020.
As in the years before, I was traveling through Europe whenever possible. I visited 11 countries and found many opportunities to use my camera:
The next trips in 2020 are already planned. I hope they will result in many nice pictures and fond memories. I wish you a happy new year!