Hi, there! Before I start representing my mind or ideas I believe it's a good idea to get to know me better.

There is something I want to share with you today. The magical exercise for long-term planning, for serious homework before starting the next step of your life, or just to remind yourself who you are and what you have done :)

Tadaaaam!

Retrospective!

Why do we need retrospectives?

This word is known to most devs in some sort of Agile work routine etc. But believe me, a work project is not the only way to use it successfully. It's an instrument each should try to come up with at least once in a couple of years to contribute to your past aims and achievements. With retro it's easier to take a step back, compare previous thoughts with your ambitions, and do whatever retrospectives are created for.

I know that would be pretty long, exhausting, or even seems unachievable to gather all your experience together. BUT I know, if you want to improve your life or career you must try to do your best!

How to build it?

There are many ways to do it, you could walk through them in the web, but I picked this one as one I appreciate the most. It helps to go through your experience, and get a better understanding of your previous thoughts, and aims. It makes it much easier to find a way out of a work crisis etc. So here we go!

REMEMBER :) That are the basics that you could use to find the way you will build the most useful retro in the world :P

The 3W - Wins, Wishes, Worries

Sample:

My company name Jan, 18 - Aug, 19

Description: That was an interesting job for an Outsource project with MEAN stack etc.....

Wins:

1. First good paid job

2. Had a nice Team lead

Wishes:

1. I wanted to become a nice codder

Worries

1. Everything was so hard!

2. I worried to be faired because of bugs

Summarize: I was glad I started my career with this company because ..... But I quit because I wanted .....

My Retrospective

Redlory Mar, 19 - Jul, 19

That was a startup, made by a friend. Something silly but actually the first real paid job for me as an Intern Frontend Vue.js developer. The only thing I really remember is that I used to start to make Vue components before really understanding how JS works properly...

Wins:

• I finally got paid for my "coding"

• Tried, for that time, one of the most trending stack

Wishes

• I wish I'd had a Team Lead to pay attention to my mistakes

Worries

• Not really) or at least don't remember

That was for sure not the best project to start with. But the key is I finally have some money gave me a boost to keep studying! But now I wish Interns would choose some really big companies with a couple of elder teammates - "babysitters". This great help could replace months of self-studying!

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FileCat Jul, 19 - Dec, 19

When Redlory my friend had run out of money I was lucky enough to find some real work having around 6 months of "junior" experience. It even had the same stack. It's a place I realized I am zero-knowledge and need to work hard to cost the money the company paid me =)

Wins:

• I am clever enough to somehow be chosen from dozens of other Juniors

• I got a small team, so I started to gain real experience and the basics of good-thone development

Wishes

• I was sure I could do some more valuable(as I thought) work. Obviously, that was deceptive thought!

Worries

• I started to have some major time management problems combining a full-time job and school.

I wasn't really concentrated on learning all the basics and some vanilla JS staff. But tried to dive into Frontend development with Vue. I thought that I know everything that is needed because tasks given to me were quite easy UI staff like components, pages, or simple business logic.

The continuation of it I'd prefer to left for myself.

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To sum up

It really took me a long time to fill up all my experience, and recollect details.

That is how my may as a Developer started. Full of mistakes, and wrong choices. Rereading this retro a few times, helped me to find and work out most of them.

I hope I encouraged you to try this fabulous tool and I hope it would work for you as well!

Thank you for reading till the end. And see you in my next posts :)