Monthly Recap - 2025-02 February

February was a slow month for personal projects. The trend from January not only continued, but picked up speed. A lot of work from my daytime job, several (if not most) nights spend working overtime. A few bright spots, but an otherwise very workaholic kind of month.

Here is a short summary.

Achievements

Professional life

Continuing to expand an Agile movement within my daytime job was a very intensive activity. I once again had to work overtime several nights.

It paid off in terms of expanding the amount of Scrum teams we have, and receiving a green light to continue with this process even though the organization at large would still lag behind several months. Doing the right thing sometimes can be very time consuming and tiresome.

Continued work on new personal project

The development for the third project in the First Steps Into AI Engineering continued, although at a slower rate than I would have liked.

Although it is taking longer that I wanted, I am rather proud of the development. I have been able to apply TDD for a significant part of it, and I am writing more unit tests than I expected to. I have also created user stories for this one, something I had not done since SnakeJS, back in 2023. Although I thought about using LLMs to generate them, like I did back then, in the end I decided to just write them myself, which was a nice exercise.

Courses

In February I went back to taking online courses about technical subjects. This is something I had done through most of my adult life, but that I stopped during 2024 to try and focus more on building personal projects. While it was very nice and productive to shift the focus, and it lead to my most productive year ever, I admit I had been missing to dedicate some time purely for learning. I guess once a nerd, always a nerd!

I picked up some refreshers about Docker and Kubernetes, after more than half a year working professionally on purely legacy systems. Although it is a topic I am fairly confident about, I feel it will be useful to slowly pick up speed on this, as I expect my next phase of AI Engineering projects to be much more involved in containerization.

Downpoints

Slow progress on personal studies

Once again, my personal studies habit has suffered the most. I went more slowly in the career studies than I did in January, with some weeks having to do no progress at all, but I was still able to advance in the book I am studying, The Captain Class.

For hobby studies, once again I did not even choose a new book to pick up.

Plans for next month

February was a really hard month for me, in terms of personal pursuits. I started March intending to at least mitigate that and increase the amount of time I could dedicate to some areas.

Monthly Recap - 2025-01 January

January saw a shift in the balance of personal work vs professional work for me. As my daytime work increased in demands, I reduce the amount of time I could spend in personal projects. Having to work extra hours sucks, but sometimes we have to pay the price to achieve things that others think are not possible.

Nevertheless, and with a lot of delay, I will post here a short summary of what went on this month.

Achievements

Professional life

Sometimes we land in some really crazy places. In my last career move, I changed from a good role in a more or less deadend organization, to a role in a very troubled part of a very good organization. While I do not regret the move, I have to be honest and say that some things in this change were a challenge. The biggest one of them was having to work in a waterfall organization.

It is 2025, and having to work with waterfall. Hard to put in words without sounding too negative, but there are a few things that we, as an industry, have definitely, unquestionably, learned. And one of them is that waterfall does not work.

This is all to say that one of the high achievements of the month was being able to establish the start of an Agile structure at work, and implementing the viable subset of Scrum for that environment. This was immensely rewarding, but at the same time it took its toll. It required many nights of overtime work to deal with all of the inefficient bureaucracy that the waterfall processes demanded, so that during the day the team could do actual, meaningful, real work. It was demanding and tiresome, but it was worth it.

Released Chargen version 1.3.1

Chargen is one of my personal projects exploring AI Engineering. I have written a blog post about it. While most of the development happened last year, in January I released a new version, Chargen 1.3.1, which fixed the initial display of the application at startup.

The display issue happened because of a missing file in the packaged jar (and a not very smart implementation of loading it), which led to the part of view that holds the generated character avatar not being considered when calculating positioning of the elements. It was fixed by adding the missing file as a resource, and changing the corresponding loading logic.

I do not expect to do a whole lot more of development for Chargen, but it remains a fun and insightful application to have built (and a sometimes useful one - I still intend to write a blog post about this in the future).

Started work on new personal project

While I can't say much about it right now, as it is still under development and not yet revealed, in January I started working on the third project in the First Steps Into AI Engineering series. This remains in active development, and I expect to finish (and reveal) it sometime in April.

Downpoints

Slow progress on personal studies

The part of my personal work that has suffered the most in the past few months has definitely been my personal studies habit. In January, I made slow, though consistent, progress on the career studies book, The Captain Class.

The hobby studies, however, remained stagnant. After finishing Brave New Words, I did not even choose the next book to pick up.

Plans for next month

Due to the slow progress in personal projects during January, I started February with the goal of mostly continuing with the current efforts, without much hope of picking anything new.