Year-end 1-on-1 Meeting with Myself
Tags: motivation, retrospective, career
Published: 2019-12-18 16:40:47

This is an experiment I thought I try at the end of this year, hopefully I remember to do this next year lol.

This 1-on-1 was taken from this template I found on my travels around the blogger web. [https://knowyourteam.com/blog/2019/12/05/one-on-one-meeting-template-for-your-year-end-review/](https://knowyourteam.com/blog/2019/12/05/one-on-one-meeting-template-for-your-year-end-review/)

# Let's Get Started

**Manager Erik:** Thanks for taking the time to sit down and type with me today. Since its the end of the year, I wanted to take a moment to sit down and do a sort of year-end chat about how you felt things have gone this past year. How's that sound?

**Developer Erik:** Oh cool, sounds good to me.

**Manager Erik:** Great, thanks. So...

> ❓How has the workflow with the end of the year crunch been feeling?

> 🦆 This year has been pretty good for the end of year life crunch. Work is well-paced but I do feel a little behind on my personal projects. I blame getting food poisoning on stopping development for an entire week. But for sure can't complain. Right now things a little hectic because I am planning to move in the beginning of January so there is a lot of packing and planning involved with all that. Hoping to tackle a lot of that during my 1 week holiday breaking during Christmas week.

---

> ❓*When you consider this past year in full, how do you feel about the progress you personally made?*

> 🦆This year I 100% feel like a made a lot of progress with a couple of bumps along the way. I made the nerve-wracking decision of leaving my old job, then made the scarier decision of leaving that new job because of bad experiences with the CEO that were screaming red flags to me, and then finding a great place now. Let's see what else... I became a Microsoft MVP which is super awesome, I am planning to take more advantage of this in the new year. My Twitch streams are staying fun and there is plenty of work to do and share with others. I also am starting to get involved more in the local meetup communities which I have been wanting to do for a while now. 

---

> ❓*How did the pace of work, and the pace of progress feel across the year?*

> 🦆I feel like the pace of work and progress on all my projects has been fast and slow at the same time. I know if that sounds weird, but I feel like I got a lot done, but at the same time, I didnt get all the things I wanted to be done so it feels like nothing was done at all. But I started doing more blogging, organized myself with Notion, and getting more involved in the community. There is still so much I want to get done but I need to make sure to balance work and life so that I don't burn out.

---

> ❓*When did you feel most proud to be a part of this past year?*

> 🦆There are two things I feel really proud to be apart of this year. 

> First, is building, maintaining, and improving my [Stream Closed Captioner Extension](https://stream-cc.gooseman.codes/). It feels great to build something people use and get feedback on. It just super fulfilling to building something and people just enjoy it.

> Second, helping organize the Twitch Dev Community Meetup the night before Twitch Con 2019 started. It was a little stressful getting everything together but the meetup was a lot of fun and I even gave a talk, and the talk went well! [You can catch my talk on my Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VngLnfTMUQI).

---

> ❓*When did you feel most discouraged this last year?*

> 🦆I dont think I have felt any discouragement this year but I have felt overwhelmed at times. There's a lot I want to do but at times I felt way too disorganized or overwhelmed that I just couldn't get a good start. Decision paralysis is the way I think of it. I want to learn more Typescript, deploy my Rails app to Azure using docker, and just experiment with more technology and languages.

---

> ❓*Who’s help or support on the team have you been most appreciative of?*

> 🦆Geez, there are so many people the have helper or supported me in one way or another that I cant remember them all off the top of my head. There have been people that have inspired me, worked with me on creating cool content, help me with ideas and just been around to talk to. Here is a list of people I want to acknowledge and thank, this is no way a complete list:

> [CSharpFriz](https://twitch.tv/CSharpFriz)
> [LuckyNoS7evin](https://twitch.tv/LuckyNoS7evin)
> [noopkat](https://twitch.tv/noopkat)
> [NinjaBunny9000](https://twitch.tv/NinjaBunny9000)
> [Instafluff](https://twitch.tv/Instafluff)
> [roberttables](https://twitch.tv/roberttables)
> [SushiCodes](https://twitch.tv/SushiCodes)
> [JamesMontemagno](https://twitch.tv/JamesMontemagno)

>  There is a lot of people in my Twitch community that have supported me and my stream and I am very thankful for all of them. There are far to many to mention but I appreciate them all. Here are the top two people that have supported my stream:
[indifferentghost](https://twitch.tv/indifferentghost)
[PakmanJr](https://twitch.tv/PakmanJr)

---

> ❓*What do you think has been the biggest area of growth for you? A time where you thought, “Woah, I really got better at this” or “I really learned something?”*

> 🦆This past year I think my ReactJS skills have gotten a lot better but I actually think my personal area of large growth has been just my technical self-confidence. Getting to a point to feel comfortable to blog, do presentations, and just help others. I feel like this had been my area of greatest growth and confidence booster. Just looking back and thinking about doing a technical talk with some degree of confidence is awesome. I will always get moments of imposter syndrome and I have learned to accept it and tell myself, you do know what you're kinda doing.

**Looking ahead:**

> ❓*In what ways do you want to stretch and grow in the upcoming year?*

> 🦆Ok so for the past year I have had been thinking about small goals to meet that I have yet to meet and want to carry this over to the new year. Here is my list thus far:
1. Try out Video Blogging for my YouTube Channel
2. Attend more technical meet-ups in the San Diego area
3. Attend a conference 
4. Submit a talk for a conference

**Takeaways and next steps:**

> ❓What are we both taking away from this conversation?

> 🦆That I am talking to myself

Thanks for reading everyone!

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Want to hang out while I work on this project and other things? You can catch me streaming on Twitch @ [https://twitch.tv/talk2megooseman](https://twitch.tv/talk2megooseman)