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Year Review 2013 - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I was reading my good friend Helen Meeks blog on her end of year review, and thought I'd do something similar...

It's been a long year, but an exciting and definitely positive one for me on both a professional and a personal front. As I write this I have been up for 2 hours with a crying baby, but strangely I still see her as a positive!

I'll start with the professional positives, as that's what people come here for, to hear about my views on my profession, I'm not sure they're so interested to hear how many nappies I changed at the weekend etc...

The biggest positive for me has to be my promotion to QA Lead, I've been striving for this promotion for a long time, and to finally get it was extremely exciting for me. It meant that I can influence people more and effect how they work and to try and make them work better and more effectively. It also means I get to work with more technologies and more teams, which I've wanted to do for a long time.

There's also a positive in that I've started this blog, I started in April, and whilst the posts have slowed down a bit, I think that was only a natural thing as I couldn't sustain posting topics once every 2 days, which I had done at the start, especially when you consider the fact that I'm a lot more busy now with the promotion and personal life. I like to think that I've changed how some people think, or even just made them think twice about something, and if people enjoy reading what I write then all the better.

There was also a trip to India, which I enjoyed massively, so much so that it has completely changed my view on how work can be outsourced effectively. The work that they are producing is comparable to the work some teams onshore are doing, and in some cases possibly even better. It was an amazing experience, albeit a brief one, hopefully in the next year I will get to go for a bit longer.

Finally, professionally I met a number of people who have helped shaped my career over the past year and helped me believe I can be whatever I want to be. I think they know who they are, so I won't bother naming and shaming them. They all believed in me and pushed me to better myself. So thanks to them for that. I wouldn't be where I am today without them.

On a personal level, obviously the birth of my daughter Jessica Rose is a massive positive, although it doesn't always seem like it, especially when she keeps me up half the night, she's definitely a driving force in everything that I do, and I love her dearly. On a similar note, I am watching my son grow up into an adorable toddler, he's not a baby no more, but then he hasn't been for a while!

One slight negative for me could have possibly been my attitude at the start of the year, looking back now it was wrong but the main driving force was wanting to better myself, but my attitude suffered at work, and I wasn't really enjoying it. Luckily I managed to get a secondment to work on automation, which I really enjoyed and helped in getting me my promotion.

So, there's definitely been more positives than negatives, and there are undoubtedly still a number of challenges ahead in 2014. Hopefully come my end of year review next year, there'll be more positives than negatives again!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year everyone!


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