Win for the Year - Career and Personal

Archive
21

Firstly :+1: Congrats on the promotion, and welcome to the MoT Club!
Great achievements. Onwards and upwards

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22

Sounds a jam packed 2020!
Here’s to an even bigger and better 2021!

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23

You always think of the best topics for discussion. I was thinking what’s a green thumb :joy:
Sounds like you adapted to the workload and did brilliantly

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Congrats congrats congrats! Had to repeat that to get round the 20 letter min on here :joy:

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  • Professional: Stood up a performance testing environment using Jmeter, contributed to same, tested three major structural changes using it, wrote some code, did some things…
  • Personal: Started HRT. Came out as trans at work. Came out as trans publically. Did a crapton of work on myself. Kept our little family safe and fed during a global pandemic.
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Personal:

  • Lost over 25 kg (55 lbs) in just 3 months. This was a huge change for me because I was overweight most of my life, and now I feel comfortable with my current weight.

Professional:

  • Finished over 300 courses just this year (main focus was on DevOps/SRE, AWS, and JavaScript)
  • Career change incoming, meeting with c-level is next week
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Thanks Mike! Same back at you! :smiley:

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Thanks Mike! In my case, my green thumb is mostly brown with mud :laughing:

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Sounds like an incredible year Alex! :raised_hands:

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Congratulations Diane on the baby news!

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32

Thanks Peet! :smiley: :heart:

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Love reading all the wins :slight_smile:.

Mine are, in no particular order:

Career:

  • Presented at the only in-person MoT Edinburgh MeetUp in January
  • Being more active in the testing community
  • Becoming more active in blogging
  • Keeping the Community of Practice going while working from home

Personal:

  • Allowed myself more time to spend on personal projects, which helped to keep me sane. Mainly all arts and crafts stuff
  • Spend holidays staying in our own country, and that re-affirmed how beautiful it is where I live
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Professional: Joined MoT, 6th anniversary at work, got a promotion, did 6 CEUs worth of programming classes.

Personal: transitioned from pre-Covid gym rat to Peloton commando logging ~6K minutes on bike & treadmill. Bought & began restoration of a 44 year old BMW found in a field. Remained mostly sane.

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Personal: Made it through shielding and living with my vulnerable beloved through the pandemic so far. Also got engaged. Got into doing yoga. Have stopped smoking. Is only a minor thing but bagged a new Xbox as well.

Professional: Have moved from a senior into junior role and am loving it. Learning more technical side of things in a great company, much less stressed if at all and didn’t have to make any kind of sacrifice.

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36

I could honestly write books on the highs and lows.

Here on MoT, I earned Club ninja of the month in Feb, which you won’t see in the ninja thread, because the reward was tickets for Test Bash… and, well… you know. So I was supposed to write a report up on that, which never happened. But it was a win, and got me to attend 3 online test bash events (Home, Manchester, Netherlands), my first test conferences.

For my career, I walked out of a job which was unsatisfying to one which challenges me every day.

When the children were home schooling, they KILLED IT. (we can take some credit for that) If we just look at the on-paper results (testing, that kind of thing), their academic progression blew away the national average.

We managed work, school, lockdowns, tragedies, victories, sickness, health and everything life could throw at us with only a few really small break downs.

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37

Omg how on earth do you manage to do 300 courses in a single year?! That’s mad. In the best possible way!! And very well done on the weight loss!

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Thank you. Original goal was just 30 courses (before corona). After corona lockdown started I’ve changed that to 100 since I was stuck at home with little else I could do and 30 was too easy. Got to 100 rather fast so I thought “Why not up that to some insane number like 300?”. Didn’t think I could make it, but here we are, at 306 completed by the end of November.

I’m taking a break this month because of AWS re:Invent (3-week online conference), then off to another 300 for the next year. :smile:

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39

My wins for 2020:

Personal:

  • Spent 6 months with my son while school was closed, we didn’t put any pressure on him, just enjoyed the time as best we could
  • Started cross stitching again in the evenings in an effort to reduce screen time
  • Made a real effort to be kinder to myself

Career:

  • Completed my AAT Advanced Accounting course
  • Became a qualified Bookkeeper and achieved AATQB status
  • Set up a bookkeeping practice
  • Started my AAT Professional Accounting course
  • Hosted a journalling session, first time doing anything like that
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40

My wins for 2020 include…

Professional:

  • Completed 12 months in the same role/company without being made redundant (yeah that happened 2 years running)
  • Have coached the team to (almost) fully understand that testing is an activity they all have to take ownership for…and not just me.
  • Have finally got my ‘testing mojo’ back - after having so many knock-backs in the last 5 years
  • Have started to build my personal brand…slowly but purposefully
  • Have started to plan my escape from engineering and get back to leading testing from the middle.

Personally…

  • Have started a blog that will focus on my testing story/journey
  • Continue to learn Python through building a rogue-like (type of video game)
  • Started to catch up on my other favourite thing…reading - the pandemic really knocked my downtime motivation this year.
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Which courses did you do that you’d recommend? I want to take on some more next year but don’t know where to start!

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