It is hard to believe that it 2023 is here already. The year of 2022 went by quickly. I would like to have a retrospective of what went well and what I can focus more on this year.
Projects Abroad & New Connections
Previously, all my work had been done in Korea. Luckily, I got to participate in some projects outside of Korea. It was really fascinating to see that I was able to fit right in and collaborate with colleagues from a different office on Day 1 because we believe in the same values. There was some language barrier between myself and the clients at times because we communicated using English but everything worked out well thanks to DeepL. This also gave me an opportunity to introduce myself at the Tokyo office and I see more and more familiar faces as time goes on.
At times I was wondering about what would be the benefit for the clients to pair with me despite the language barrier. One could argue that it could improve their English skills because they have to express and listen in English when they pair with me. But that was not enough for me.
At the end of the first engagement abroad, I got a farewell card and one Designer colleague wrote this:
“Thank you so much for being 000 Team and helping out to realize the app in rocket speed!”
Thanks, that’s what I was looking for.
New Programming Languages
One difference that two offices had was exposure to programming languages. In Korea, a lot of enterprises use Java and Javascript. However, that was not the case in Tokyo. There were more projects using Kotlin over Java and Typescript over Javascript. Of course, I am currently in the an engagement using Golang. I felt lucky that I got to experience using new programming languages. However, I didn’t get to learn each language at a deep level so I hope to dig more and have a richer understanding in 2023. In a short term, I plan on writing some articles about writing test code using Golang because I had a hard time finding some materials for it. Always remember that
“Testability determines the success of a project.”
Book Reviews
In 2022, two people asked me to review their books. One was about translating an existing book regarding Technical Debt into a Korean edition and the other was writing a brand new book regarding Domain Driven Design and Event Sourcing. It is a voluntary task and it does take a lot of efforts but I accepted because it’s a new experience and thank you for having faith in me. It is an exciting feeling imagining myself looking at these books in a book store in 2023 (hopefully soon).
Inner Peace
Back when I was part of an architecture team in my previous job, my role back then was to implement common libraries or features that many microservices can utilize. People were asking and pushing for more and more features with different needs and they had a tendency of pointing fingers at us whenever there was a system failure. Maybe it is their culture, I am not sure. But it made me somewhat angry at times.
In the past two years, I realized that I have become more laid back at work. Everyone is hard working and honest. We have a group of special talent who strive to be better as time goes on. Even the colleagues I met from different offices are all nice and they excel in their domains. I think I now understand when people say they value who they get to work with when looking for new jobs.
2023 is here. I am not sure how things will turn out but there are a lot of uncertainties due to high inflation, high interest rate, and high exchange rate. But somehow we will get through and will see you again.
