Professionally, this year felt like it provided a ton of growth, first technically and then in soft skills. Joining Ameriprise involved diving head-first into a greenfield project using React, Redux and Typescript, all of which were new to me. The first five months was mainly heads-down coding, with a pretty sharp transition into tech leadership beginning in June when Chris, the tech lead on my team, left the company. At this point, I was managing the project I helped to start, mentoring three fantastic junior developers, and collaborating with my boss and other tech leads in the group to define Ameriprise’s approach to front end development. Added to this were the challenges of being a fully remote employee on a co-located team, which presented themselves once I moved from Minneapolis to Brooklyn at the end of July. Overall, I’ve been really pleased with my experience at Ameriprise and with how I’ve managed to juggle the variety and novelty (for me) of the challenges I’ve faced.
Looking forward to 2019, I’m hoping to play an even more integral role in defining the processes and culture at Ameriprise. The front-end group has grown tremendously in the past year; between absorbing another team and new hires, we’ve roughly tripled the number of devs from when I started. We’re now at a scale where many of the more ad hoc systems that I first encountered when I started need to be given either some TLC or a complete overhaul in order to keep working effectively. Interviewing, onboarding, feedback mechanisms, inter-project tech lead communication, dissemination of knowledge/decisions across the entire group, among others all have potential for improvement, and the more I’ve dug into these issues, the more I’m excited to tackle them.
Books Read/Listened To (favorites in bold)
Nonfiction:
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - Robert Caro
- Miles: The Autobiography - Miles Davis
- Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport
- Open: An Autobiography - Andre Agassi
- Grant - Ron Chernow
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Rework - Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
Fiction:
- Lost in the City - Edward P. Jones
- Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
- Another Country - James Baldwin
- Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates - Tom Robbins
- The Lover - Marguerite Duras
- Money: A Suicide Note - Martin Amis
- City of Glass - Paul Auster
- Cathedral - Raymond Carver
- The Odyssey - Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
After making this list, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much ground I had covered this year between books and audiobooks. Around the beginning of the year, I was beginning to feel bored by podcasts, which more and more felt lacking in both depth and entertainment (the former for a variety of reasons and the latter due to the triteness of the format). I picked up ‘The Power Broker’ on Audible and began listening to it on my walks to and from work. Binging large biographies or autobiographies that I likely wouldn’t want to devote time to actually reading ended up being my pattern of listening for the entire year. ‘Grant’ and ‘Team of Rivals’ were the easy highlights, as they deftly managed to be both highly educational and thoroughly entertaining. My only regret is that I hadn’t stopped to take notes, something I intend to correct in 2019.
On the fiction side, the huge win this year was making reading the last thing I do before going to bed. This has two effects: first, I read consistently, even if only a little each night and second, I sleep better. McCarthy, Carver, and Dueras were all fantastic; the lattermost certainly deserves another read or two. I was disappointed by ‘The Odyssey’, which was very dry. By the end I felt I could have foregone the story itself in favor of the excellent ~100 page essay at the beginning by the translator, Emily Wilson. Someday soon I’m going to swing by a library and thumb through a couple of the older translations to see if what they lack in Wilson’s linguistic precision and sagacity they make up for in a more evocative and entertaining read.