Learn Agile Practices Wrapped 2023

Celebrate the journey, embrace the lessons! 🎉 Join me in reflecting on the milestones, the learnings, and the evolution that made 2023 an unforgettable year for me and Learn Agile Practices.

Dec 12, 2023

Introduction

Hello, developers! 🚀

Another year has come to an end, and it’s the first year of this newsletter, that started the 20th of January this year with the first article: Why Agile is important?

Today, I want to share with you my personal retrospective on this years, considering all aspects of my professional life as a Software Engineer and Content Creator, and in the first issue of the year I will also share my objectives for 2024.

The reason to share this kind of stuff is that sharing is a great way to both celebrate success (and you will hopefully celebrate with me!) and also commit to the new objectives and make them more concrete. It’s a great way to find motivation, and I’ve started doing this since 2020 when my content was only Italian.

I will be short, I promise: let’s jump into it!

Happenings and Achievements

This year, I started the Learn Agile Practices journey: LAP currently is made by this newsletter, but in my head, it’s already clear how to evolve it and to make it become much more: more types of content (audio/video) and a technical coaching service for developers (personal coaching always available, but also free sessions and workshop).

In this first year, the result was pretty good! I reached 54 subscribers to the newsletter, and 129 subscribers to my Youtube channel. I offered my first free TDD Workshop, which was a great success, and I was able to speak at a great conference such as the Italian Agile Days 2023, but also to a couple of meetups - and I’m particularly proud of my talks! In addition, a collaboration with Codemotion started: I will write a monthly article in Codemotion Magazine (in Italian) about Agile practices and methodologies, the first one will be out before Christmas!

It was a great first year, and hopefully, the next one will be even better!

In case you missed them, these were the top 2 most read articles from this year:

From a professional point of view, I kept investing a lot of time in learning and continuous improvement, focusing on different objectives: improving my approach to learning, improving my communication skills, and deep dive into top Agile practices such as Refactoring, TDD, etc.

This is the list of the books I read (or studied) in 2023:

Non-violent communication → a nice framework for effectively communicating things without hurting people, especially when expressing negative feedback or critics
Practice Perfect → a wonderful book about coaching techniques and best practices, useful from both perspectives of the teacher and the learner, and therefore useful for when I’m learning but also when I’m coaching
Refactoring → a milestone about how to approach refactoring effectively; the most relevant part, IMHO, is that refactoring can only happen if we have tests to validate that the behavior doesn’t change - and that refactoring should be a daily habit, not a special occasion
Practices of an Agile Developer → a cool book that is a quick trip around all the best technical practices known today; a great refresher of all of those, with some gems and personal examples from real experience
Accelerate → by far the best book I read this year - the moment I discovered that a book based on research that proves that techniques such as TDD and CD have a positive impact on business exists, I knew I had to read it, and it was amazing as expected; the info in this book is the best argument existing to support why such practices should be implemented in every company

From a career point of view, I realized one of my objectives: working from home for a foreign company outside of Italy. I currently work for TourRadar, a travel-tech company based in Vienna: a company with such a great culture and passionate people, and I’m very proud to be part of it.

Learnings

It’s good to rethink what happened and fall into a bit of nostalgia, but the main reason to do it is to learn something from it - so here is what I learned this year:

I love speaking in public. I like it and I want to invest some learning time in it to improve my public speaking skills, for sure.
I prefer sync software development: async work is a thing today, especially when working remotely, but I think we are overusing async - especially for refinements, brainstorming, and software development, I love sync conversations. Refining a feature or request is easier with a conversation, same as pair/mob programming is better than async PRs.
I believe I have some entrepreneurial spirit: I don’t think I will ever jump into my own startup unless I find an idea that makes me fall in love, but I would love to jump into a startup as the first and only developer at the beginning, for sure!
After a lot of learning about practices and methodologies (and much more to learn, especially about ATDD, BDD, and DDD), I think it’s probably time to enlarge my portfolio of languages

See you in 2024

And that was my wrap for the 2023 year of myself and Learn Agile Practices! Hope you liked it, feel free to share your learnings of the year and any feedback or suggestions about LAP!

The newsletter will be back on the 16th of January, with the first issue exploring my objectives for 2024 and presenting all the news that will come - then, we will jump back into content with a great topic: Lean!

Until next time, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, but most of all, Happy coding 🤓👩‍💻👨‍💻