My 2021 Wrapped
2021 was an exciting year. As always, I tend to start with many good ideas and objectives. Then around April/May, I lose track of everything, distracted by other things until November, when I realize the year is ending soon.
Last year I published the list of books I read. This year, I decided to expand this format, including personal learnings and experiences.
2021 Highlights
- Joined Yelp in a remote position from UK
- Talked at SwiftHeroes 2021
- Open sourced PR Assigner, an internal tool I created in Just Eat for developer productivity
- Helped my mentee to find their first job in a company as iOS Engineer
Books
I completed my challenge of reading 15 books! It may not sound a lot, but it's a significant achievement given what happened this year.
Books are an effective way for me to learn. From my vast reading list, I usually pick up the ones that talk about a challenge or problem that I'm facing at that moment.
- Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
- Growing As a Mobile Engineer by Gergely Orosz
- Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track by Will Larson
- Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal
- Secure by Design by Dan Bergh Johnsson, Daniel Deogun, Daniel Sawano
- Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson
- Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 Engineering Challenges by Gergely Orosz
- Cracking the PM Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, Jackie Bavaro
- System Design Interview – An Insider's Guide by Alex Xu
- The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
- Practical Combine by Donny Wals
- Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products by Marty Cagan, Chris Jones
- The Tech Resume Inside Out by Gergely Orosz
- A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
Lessons learned
- Communication is a crucial skill, no matter what career path you'll choose
- Stakeholders don't read slides shared via email. They prefer a short list of bullet points
- It's important to be able to communicate the results of your work to get recognition