2012 Achievements and 2013 Goals/Resolutions

With some prompting from this post on Software Testing Club about accomplishments for the year, and my own here about resolutions for 2013, I figured a blog post was in order. So here we go:

2012 Achievements/Accomplishments

• Became more involved in the QA community (see previous post about joining STC)
• Started blogging more, and working on articles to submit to publications
• Improved the hiring process at work for my team, though I have a LOT of work to do on it still (if you see my twitter feed on any given weekday, you’ll know what I mean)
• Worked on my interviewing skills ( I interviewed a LOT of people)
• Convinced my company to be a bit more involved in the community, and got sponsorship of a local conference out of it 😀
• Got the ball rolling on performance reviews at my company, too (reviews themselves will probably happen after a deadline in January… I hope)
• Became an aunt (again) to a baby that decided to arrive at home on the kitchen floor! She’s got my genes for sure 😛
• Went to an amazing conference – KalamazooX – for the first time. Only conference I got to this year 🙁
• Had a case of mono that left me working from home for 2 weeks. It was wonderful!
• Found a good guy, and moved him and his cat into my place 😛
• Made entirely too many tweets/FB posts about how I was “still at the office” late into the night and on weekends. Got to know the janitors in the office pretty well, though :/
• Attended a ridiculous amount of networking events for IT, representing my company and looking for fresh blood
• Found a few really good gluten-free beers. Really expensive, so I don’t get them often, but just knowing they exist makes me terribly happy
• Very nearly started a new opportunity, but was called back to the current one at the last minute. I took the counteroffer, let’s just leave it at that…
• Launched the community edition of our software, which was a huge painful effort 😛

2013 Goals and Resolutions

• Achieve a better work/life balance. This will be the most difficult of all of my goals…
• Attend CAST, KalamazooX, IT in the D, and maybe some other conferences too
• Submit a talk to a conference and/or user group
• Actually do above talk
• Submit articles to QA publication
• Attend at least one GiveCamp; I didn’t attend any this year and I’m jonesing for it!
• Assist in coordination of and/or attend Detroit GiveCamp
• Seek out new opportunities…
• Finally write that Android app I’ve been thinking about for a while
• Write more code in general. Ruby, Java, C, and of course my favorite, Perl.
• Continue to be involved in the QA community
• Hire some people that actually know WTF they’re doing
• Actually go to the gym I have a membership for >.<
• Be a better leader

I think that’s all for the accomplishments and goals (except for a few personal goals I’ll keep to myself :P). What about you? Have you thought about what you want to do next year?

Hilary

I’m Hilary Weaver-Robb, also known as g33klady on the Internets. I’m a Senior Quality Engineer working remotely near Detroit, I tweet a lot (@g33klady), and swear a lot, too.