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.