Oh man, 2018 has been a wild ride. With less than an hour left on the clock, I’m going to do my best to sum up a year worth of professional and personal experiences.
Q1: A “thanks” + WTF sandwich
Thanks SDL
For the fifth year in a row I was honored with the SDL MVP award in early January. I was surprised to win it (I’m surprised every year, to be honest; I’m not like those other MVPs with their DXA-developing, .net loving, Topology-Managing ways). The SDL MVP program is an amazing program that actually does a solid job at encouraging you to share what you know about the SDL ecosystem. So this is a big “thanks” to the SDL MVP committee.
WTF?
Then, I was put on a project where the last two architects had quit.
I was not an architect.
I was a front-end dude who just knew a tad more about Tridion than the average person at the company. The project, to say the least, was awful. I had to drag it, kicking and screaming, over a finish line. It was a project built with an architecture that was wholely new to me and the company, using technologies that were new, and of course, way overdue.
But we did it. We delivered. I’ve never been great at C#, but I sure got better. I wrote DXA models. I wrote helpers in .net. I did .net core debugging. I learned what 700 websites does to a Topology Manager database. I learned how much of a pain it is to undo Audience Manager database field changes. I learned how terrible of an idea it is to blend .net core with Vue for a web application.
I was lucky to be surrounded by a very good set of developers who could show me what I was doing wrong, and help me learn what I didn’t know (Thanks Sarah Braumiller, Brandon Bernard, Matt Miller, and Maja Peijic).
I ended up putting a ton of DXA questions on the Tridion StackExchange during that time. An extended thanks to Bart Koopman, Rick Pannekoek, and others.
Thanks Tahzoo
Despite the project itself being a crapstorm blowing on a dumpster-fire set in the middle of FUBAR-town, it finally launched.
And I was promoted to Principal Software Architect.
I don’t think I really earned the title. After all, I didn’t know anything about architecting beforehand, and I realized right-quick I had to figure that stuff out on my own afterhand.
But I paid attention, listened to folks more experienced than I, and managed to be an architect on a PoC that seemed pretty successful. I learned a lot more about the bigger pieces of the SDL ecosystem that put Tridion together, like how DXA gets incorporated as TBBs into Tridion/Sites
Q3: You can’t learn parenting
So, we became foster parents…
If you haven’t heard, my wife and I are adopting.
More like…we’ve been trying to adopt. Forever. We’ve been waiting to get placed with an infant for close to five years now.
So, we realized something, “We have a nice house. We have the resources. We have room. We can be temporary parents.”
So we became foster parents. We went through the eight-week training. This marks the third time we’ve gone through 16+ hours of training to be a parent. We basically have an Associate’s degree in parenting.
We weren’t even finished with the training when our new case worker had found children for us.
Two weeks after finishing our training, two girls came to live with us.
What parenting feels like
I remember taking Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu a few years back, for about two years. After a year, I decided to do a competition; I’d learned enough that my instructor was confident that I should give it a shot.
In my first round, I remember thinking about three seconds in, “well, shit.”
Then, in the second round, I thought, “Let me try…well…shit”
And the whole 90 seconds of my second round was me in an arm-bar just waiting for the other guy to get tired ( he did). I just got a hyper-extended elbow out of the deal.
That’s what an Associates degree in parenting gets you when a 9-year-old and a 2-year-old show up at your door.
You’re just sitting there trying to think of something to do while you hope your opponent gets tired. In this case, your opponent is a traumatized nine-year-old and a two-year old.
Have you ever seen a turd bounce…
…on carpet?
I have.
I had no idea how incredibly focused I would be on other people’s bowel movements. No one tells you this in parenting classes. They tell you about sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse.
They don’t tell you what to do when a 2-year-old only drops a deuce every two weeks and as a result has turds that have the density of depleted uranium. I saw a butt-nuget drop out of this kids diaper and it bounced on a carpeted floor.
It’s her and worms, I’m sure, that lose 25% of their body mass every time they take a crap.
This two-year-old leaves a turd so big in the toilet that it not only pokes out of the water, I break a bottle of champagne on it and wish it a safe voyage.
So yeah. Parenting. No one told me about the turds.
Q3: SDL Web Tridion Sites is amazing!
I got to go to the Tridion Developer Summit in Amsterdam this year, for the first time in a few years. It reminded me that I still liked the SDL community and what it did.
So I did my first-ever talk where I really didn’t talk about code. I talked about node.js and architecture.
That was fun. It was fun to go, fun to speak, and fun to bring souvenirs home to the kids.
It was awesome to see what XPM will look like in Sites 9.5 I also learned a lot about docs which is proving useful in a current client engagement.
Q4: Back-end dev?
Yep. I got put on a project as a back-end dev. I ended up putting suggestions on SDL’s ideas forum. One for RTF configuration presets, and another for a constraints schema. Much like in the first quarter, it was not a fun experience. I had a lot of learning on the job, and this time no one around to help me out. But I still learned a lot about DXA and Powershell. I learned what not to do with XPM ( a post for another time). I also learned more about thinking about the whole implementation, rather than just my few lines of code.
Maybe I’m getting the hang of architecting after all?