My plans for 2024
The new year has come and as every year the LAP restart with some spoilers of what will come in the next months and my personal objectives!
Introduction
Happy 2024, developers! 🚀
A new year has arrived, and every year I start my content production by sharing publicly my plans and objectives for the year, in this case specifically for Learn Agile Practices. You will find spoilers about new types of content and formats, the evolution of existing formats, and my personal learning plan related to my professional growth.
As always, the target is double: on one side, sharing these objectives will motivate me more in trying to achieve them, but on the other side, as always with any of my content, I hope that these objectives might inspire and be useful to you all.
Let’s start!
Learn Agile Practices evolution
The most important element of LAP currently is the newsletter, and this will remain true because it’s the main content I do in English and this is important for me - anyway, an evolution in the format is required from my point of view.
In the latest issues, I noticed that I felt the desire to invest more time into my take section, and less time into the introduction; this not only made it harder to write but also caused the two sections to be a bit mixed compared to the past; because of this, I decided to simplify the newsletter and just write everything in a single section, where I will for sure introduce the topic but will put more focus on my point of view and reflection on it. The Go Deeper section will remain: I consider that one of the identifiers of my content: there’s always a way to deep dive into a topic if you are interested, and helping in doing that is an important objective of my content.
The biggest news from a content production point of view is that I will be back with Youtube videos and podcasts: by the end of January I will be back with a video podcast series of episodes that will be available both on video and podcast, but it will be all in Italian, at least for now. This is mainly because it’s easier for me to create such content without too much preparation if I use my natural language, and it's also easier to invite other developers to a monthly interview special edition episode that I plan to start. I want to bring 2 main formats to my video podcasts:
The Weekly Pomodoro: one topic, 25 minutes available for me to talk about it. Weekly on Thursday, the first episode will be out on the 25th of January
The Debate: a monthly episode coming out on the last Wednesday of each month, in addition to the weekly one; I will deep dive into a hot topic (typically introduced in the previous Weekly Pomodoro) with one or more guests that will either disagree with me about the topic or be an expert on it that can share some insights with us.
You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here and see on which platform the podcast is available here to follow.
Then, let’s talk about my services: personal coaching service will remain available - all the previous coaching has been completed and I’m thinking of evolving this service but for now is available in the same format: 699$ for 12 one-hour lessons, with a First Lesson Free policy (enjoy the first free session and get to know me to see why I am the right person for you to improve your professionalism as a software developer) and also remember that you have access to dedicated discount as a subscriber to this newsletter, just contact me to discover more.
But the main service I will focus on this year is my TDD & OOP Workshop: the first edition last year was a great success, with 8 participants in a 4-hour practical session and very positive feedback. I plan to repeat at least 3 more free versions of the workshop in the first quarter of 2024, to keep improving the format, and then start offering a paid version in the second half of the year, both online and in person (somewhere in Milan).
The best way to remain updated on all my initiatives, in addition to this newsletter, is to follow me on LinkedIn here.
My learning plan
I’ve reflected a lot on my learning plan for this year because there are multiple topics that I’m interested in - hopefully, the plan is not impossible to achieve:
First of all, I want to go even more in-depth with my knowledge about OOP and TDD, meaning not only improving even more with the practices but also expanding the list of OOP programming languages I know. My plan here is to deep dive into books like: “
Clean Code”, “Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests”, “Working Effectively with Legacy Code”. On the other side, I will study multiple programming languages: Typescript (I already know it and worked with it for a couple of years, but I don’t work with it now and I want to go deeper with it, but also Go, Rust, and Ruby. The idea here is to read the documentation and use some tools:Exercism to move the first steps with Katas of raising difficulty
Code Challenges newsletter from John Crickett, to raise the level with more structured projects
CodeCrafters to make the most realistic project possible creating clones of Redis, Docker, or other famous existing products
In the end, I will probably pick one of those languages, the one that I liked the most, to dive even more into it with a book and an even bigger side project.
Functional Programming: I want to start learning this paradigm, that I already faced and worked on for a year in 2020/2021, but it has been a while and not much knowledge has remained on me so it’s like I have to start from scratch. The plan is to do this in the second part of the year, and I will probably start by following Giulio Canti’s course guide in this repository (I had the pleasure to participate in one of its courses and this should help me remember most of it), then I will probably go with “
From Object To Functions”, a book that has been strongly suggested to me. Finally, I will probably also readDomain modeling made functional.Public speaking: in 2023 I experienced my first talk at a conference, and in the entire year I had 3 talks in Meetups and 1 talk at a big conference (Italian Agile Days). I love that, so I plan to take more talks and participate in more conferences this year, and I would also like to invest some time in learning public speaking. I’m still exploring the how, what, and when of this, so if you have any suggestions please feel free to contact me!
That’s it with my 2024 goals, let me know what you think and what are your goals!
Before saying hi, here is a short spoiler recap of the following appointment with LAP:
The podcast returns, in Italian and also on video, with new episodes starting in 2 days:
25th of January - The Weekly Pomodoro: Why I don’t like async work
31st of January - The Debate: Async work w/ Jaga Santagostino & Simone D’avico
1st of February - The Weekly Pomodoro: Object-Oriented Programming Misconceptions
Next week in this newsletter → Lean Software Development
On February, specific date tba: 2nd edition of my “TDD & OOP” Workshop Online, 6 seats available
The best way to remain updated on all this stuff is to remain subscribed to this newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn here. Always feel free to contact me for any questions or needs, I’m also available for some mentorship and support in general, and always happy to help if I can!
Until next time, happy coding! 🤓👩💻👨💻