An act of kindness-to-self
Here are some resolutions I accomplished this year. I can't remember if they were New Year's Resolutions or just little "r" resolutions, but they are accomplishments.
- Married Sarah.
- Skied enough to make season pass a very good bargain.
- Nailed all three release dates at work.
- Learned, advocated, and taught several XP's practices. Planning Game, Short Releases, Metaphor, Simple Design, Collective Ownership, Continuous Integration, and Coding Standards all helped us meet the deadlines. It's also a measure of my success in leading the team to experiment with those practices. Our QA Manager and I were consistently Testing, I was unit testing, he was acceptance testing. I tried Refactoring. But I couldn't persuade the rest of the team to adopt those practices nor Pair Programming. We practiced a 45-hour or 50-hour Week. We continually suffered from too little communication with our over-stretched Product Manager, the closest we could get to an On-site Customer.
- Rode the bus to work most weeks. That was my little contribution to several causes: reducing Denver's Brown Cloud, reducing the US reliance on petroleum, reducing my own consumption.
- Decided to sell my car to contribute more.
- Actually sold it. :-)
- Made a habit of buying mostly organic food.
- Stopped eating most meals at restaurants.
- Shopped at the farmer's market.
- Spent more of my money at locally owned businesses.
- Reused more, recycled more, and threw away less. Bought products in larger volumes or in bulk to reduce the amount of packaging I bought in the first place.