DEV Community

How are you winding down your year?

Ben Halpern on December 16, 2019

Either personally or as a team, what's the vibe like as you wrap up 2019 and look forward to 2020?

Collapse
 
itsasine profile image
ItsASine (Kayla)

Heh, at work, it's certainly more on the side of having time to do side projects or administrative things rather than heavy feature work. Since our process involves a minimum of 4 people (dev, reviewer, QA, accepter) and there's only 3 in the office the rest of the month, the work we're taking on is super minimal (and our PM will have to remotely accept stuff).

At home, I'm balls to the wall trying to have a productive year-end. Planning out blog posts I'd like to do in 2020, buying Def Leppard tickets for my 28th birthday 🤘, checking calorie counts of all the holiday party wares, setting up a Notion environment (with the free student account) to keep track of ALL THE IDEAS, and playing the Fallout 76 holiday event.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

At home, I'm balls to the wall trying to have a productive year-end. Planning out blog posts I'd like to do in 2020, buying Def Leppard tickets for my 28th birthday 🤘, checking calorie counts of all the holiday party wares, setting up a Notion environment (with the free student account) to keep track of ALL THE IDEAS, and playing the Fallout 76 holiday event.

Same energy I'm closing the year with 😄

Collapse
 
andevr profile image
drew

How is fallout 76 post fallout?

Collapse
 
kyleboe profile image
Kyle Boe

Saved up some PTO and am taking a nice long 2 week break starting this Friday. Going to go to the Oregon coast for a bit and do some camping.

I try to keep the end of the year as a time to rest and assess the past year and make goals for the year ahead.

Collapse
 
thewasif profile image
Muhammad Wasif • Edited

2019 was great. I learned a skill, which I'm gonna use my entire life. ReactJS!
Stepping towards cloud native by learning Kubernetes
I've also learned Docker
Doing all this, because one day, I want to be like you @ben . A founder!

Collapse
 
nomangul profile image
Noman Gul

Keep it up buddy 🙂

Collapse
 
shiling profile image
Shi Ling

I like to take this slower time of the year to do spring cleaning on documentation 🙂

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I've been wanting to use the phrase "spring cleaning" in a similar way but felt like it wasn't the right phrase 😄

Collapse
 
hantu0 profile image
Tim

"Housekeeping" may be a serviceable term.

Collapse
 
shiling profile image
Shi Ling

Ah, spring cleaning has been a ritual for me every December since young, so the phrase came naturally. Though these days I sometimes use the phrase "Marie Kondo-ing" my code / documentation / etc. :D

Collapse
 
femi_dd profile image
/ • Edited

So I decided to complete some courses on FreeCodeCamp and so far it's been fun. I recently completed the API and Microservices section and got my certificate on it, right now I'm on the Javascript Algorithm and Data Structures course, and it's really been fun so far for me.

Collapse
 
metalmikester profile image
Michel Renaud

At work, still fighting the good fight trying to get DataTables (see datatables.net) column filters working the way we want (we have a more complicated use case than usual). I thought I was done yesterday, then found one field that doesn’t work for some reason. I was almost hoping to die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. :) Just 6 days of work left before I take some time off until after my birthday in January.

At home, trying to get into Vue.js, but so far it’s been more of a war with tooling than being able to toy with Vue.js. Visual Studio 2019, VS Code, Webstorm, all giving me various levels of grief.

Collapse
 
schwad profile image
Nick Schwaderer

Easing up on the 'paid coding' workload, and I'm starting to refocus on the love and joy of coding and community.

That means revamping PastRubies ( pastrubies.com ), having a crack at AdventOfCode, and also trying out fun resources like destroyallsoftware.com , upcase.com and codility.com to reinvigorate the love of coding! 🥰

There were a couple months this year where I feel that I let the pendulum swing the other way - where coding and creating started to feel like just a "job" and a "source of income". So I'm personally enjoying refocusing on the love of the craft again. ❤️

Collapse
 
femi_dd profile image
/ • Edited

it's a great way to start, but not for someone new to the API and Microservices keyword or technology, there are no explanations on what Microservices or APIs are. I would advise a person to read up a few things on API and Microservices before taking the course just to get some theoretical idea on what it's about. FreeCodeCamp is a great resource nevertheless.

So personally, it's great because I checked out the meaning of these keywords, saw some tutorials and wrote a couple of things myself

Collapse
 
axelledrouge profile image
AxelleDRouge

Ah with a perfect timing I am ending a project and starting a new one with a full tech ReactJS. No more working on code legacy, I'm starting from scratch, without stupid history that I must follow because... a really new project to build.

Collapse
 
andevr profile image
drew

As far as vibe, for me its keep on trucking. I've been learning Java so continuing with that, hoping to get through the main parts of the course I'm doing in the next couple months. As far as my job goes, I probably won't see home until next year, but I'm just keeping my head up. I plan to be job searching by no later than June.

Collapse
 
kimberrleigh profile image
Kim

Trying to plan out what I want to focus on in 2020 for my personal/career development space, what technologies/languages/tools I need to position my career in a good spot.

Resting as much as I can as well, since I was hit with food poisoning and then a cold that won't leave!

Collapse
 
peterwitham profile image
Peter Witham

For the projects I work on and my team, it's all about getting as many things cleared out as possible. Any loose ends that we never tied up. Any little bugs or features that we can take a little time to look at that are low impact.

Then, recover ready for next year :)

Collapse
 
mike_hasarms profile image
Mike Healy

The vibe is very frustrated. Project(s) I'd queued up for the quiet period did not kick off in time, and it's left me in the lurch.

Getting anything new going at this time is difficult, because there's no urgency.

Collapse
 
kamranayub profile image
Kamran Ayub

Finishing up a course on contributing to open source this week! ✨ It's been about 120 hours of work so far since mid-October so I'm excited to wrap it up and share it. Next week we'll be visiting family in South Dakota and I'll be catching up on some games: Outer Worlds, Breath of the Wild, and Halo: Reach! 🎮

Collapse
 
ludamillion profile image
Luke Inglis

No hope of actually winding down for me; My wife and I are on baby watch expecting our third child...

That said I'm finally joining the rest of the web dev world and learning some React.

Collapse
 
askeridos profile image
Adam AUTUORI

I finished the year being financially in shit, obtained a diploma which is of no use to me because I have no experience. I have the opportunity to be trained with OTIS to be an automatic door technician, and another part of me is still convinced of being a developer. I think 2020 will be the year of change, I know I have to finish what I started and be more daring.

Collapse
 
olivierjm profile image
Olivier JM Maniraho • Edited

Going on leave till the year ends and also finding time to work on my personal website which I am excited about.
Next year I look forward to working more remotely despite electricity being a huge issue on this side of the world.

Collapse
 
patrickb profile image
Patrick Bradshaw • Edited

My wife and I just moved to a different state (from Utah to Oregon, it's another time zone over) to be closer to family. About a month before our planned move, we found out we had carpet beetles (they're like bed bugs) and had to move sooner than we were prepared for. I was able to work out a remote position with my employer (first company I ever had programming job with, started ~2 years ago). I've never worked remotely before and turns out it is freaking hard for me. I have a desk right next to my bed in a big house with kids running around and dogs barking and so much activity (we live with my wife's parents). I also have bipolar disorder and my mood tanked in November which made it impossible to work from home. My wife and I only have one car, so she drives it to work (leaves at 6 in the morning, I usually don't stop working until 1 in the morning). So most days I walk about 40 minutes to the library or to a coffee shop to get some a couple of hours of quiet work time during the day. At any rate, I fell way behind at work and school (I take online classes working towards my bachelor's degree in software development), and recently decided to start looking for jobs and told my bosses that I was looking at moving on. They were really supportive, but it was kinda heavy, the company is super small.

So the end of 2019 is me trying to finish up all my tasks for this giant e-commerce project that slowly became mine at work. Tonight I figured out how to fetch my clients' Instagram photos to display on their website, I think I have 4 more tasks to do, plus all this school work.

I don't mind though, even if I'm feeling a little burned out by it. Programming has been kind of a neat "side quest" in my life and I look forward to many more years working like some sort of decrepit elf in front of a screen.

Collapse
 
murkrage profile image
Mike Ekkel

The end of the year is usually considered the busiest time of the year, but I find it rather relaxing. For one: I tend to use my PTO for Xmas. Mainly because that's also when my birthday is. Wind down, relax and get ready for the new year. I love week 52. I usually use that time to play some videogames, work on some personal projects and visit the family.

I've got an amazing opportunity lined up for me. Hopefully that all goes well and I can start 2020 joining a new team and working on an amazing product!

Collapse
 
sandordargo profile image
Sandor Dargo

I just visited NYC and completed an item from my bucket list by watching an NBA game live.

Collapse
 
ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II • Edited

Expensively:

Got my car out of the garage at the end of November after having had to spend $2400 getting it to pass safety- and emissiosn-inspections.

Wife's safety- and emissions-inspections were this week. Looks like it's gonna be $2700 to get her car to pass.

And, because my company has a "you can't burn PTO and work OT in the same pay-period" policy combined with being at the part of the year where I'm having to burn PTO lest I get bit by the company's "use it or lose it" carryover-maximums, I can't offset those car-expenses with OT. :p

Collapse
 
markrailton profile image
Mark Railton

Clearing up my final few tasks at work before leaving and starting a new job in the new year. My Christmas break will mostly involve playing as much as possible with ReactJS including getting a solid grip of testing it so that I'll be ready to rock in January.

Besides that, also spend plenty of time with family and maybe just a lil bit playing some Eve Online

Collapse
 
tatianacodes profile image
Tatiana • Edited

Personally: Gearing up and planning for 2020! Really focusing on buckling down on my learning, and planning projects to add to my portfolio. I'm hitting a stride in my learning and understanding, so I think it's time to make some "big" projects, and dedicate more time to my learning, especially as I learn backend.

I filled out my Passion Planner, and it's exciting to see what my goals were for 2019, and what they are for 2020, and how they overlap. Also gearing up for an intentional job search in 2020. I'm fired up and excited to begin the work now!

Collapse
 
jsn1nj4 profile image
Elliot Derhay

Gonna take some time with my family. We were thinking about going out-of-state, but we decided to stay home this time. Just gonna spend time together, do chores (the ones that never end), and maybe go to a nearby park or 2 during my time off.

And then it starts all over again! 🙃

Collapse
 
codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Wait, I'm supposed to "wind down"?

Collapse
 
tterb profile image
Brett Stevenson

I'm prepping for the public release of a project that I've been spearheading at work and finally wrapping up my CS degree.

Collapse
 
joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

Code freeze mid dec

Collapse
 
elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

I'm going to update my digital calendars and replace two digits instead of one.

Collapse
 
leob profile image
leob

Business as usual, same same same :-)

Collapse
 
lukewestby profile image
Luke Westby

Lots of retros!