A Personal Portfolio

I’ve been using Atlassian’s software products a lot over the past year.  Between work, and some of the FOSS projects I use, I’ve become very used to using JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, and Crucible, and really I would recommend them to any software development team.  Recently, Atlassian has added added a section to their site on their agile development practices, (or at least I just recently noticed it).  It makes sense for them, as agile development goes hand in hand with their software offerings, but I’ve also found the site to be a good crash course for someone that is relativley new to team based software engineering.

I found one of their blog posts to be really interesting, mainly because I attend a stand-up meeting every morning at work, and I would have never thought it to be a trendy project management process unless I had started looking into agile development.  Basically, the idea behind a stand up meeting is for your team to meet every morning in a circle and have everyone answer three questions in about a minute: what you did yesterday, what you are planning to do today, what (if any) roadblocks you are facing.  I’ve been attending meetings like this for about 10 minutes every morning for about a month and a half now.  At first, I realized that the meetings were helping to keep the team in sync and could make sure no one was doing duplicate work, but I never really thought much more about how these meetings work for the team (more than it makes sure where all at work by 9:30).

As time goes on, I’ve realized that these meetings also serve as a powerful motivational tool for a team.  I’ve found that I now make sure I stay productive throughout the day to make sure I have something interesting to say each morning.  I now keep a running list of what I’m doing and make to-do lists each morning.  Now, I have even started consciously allotting myself a certain amount of time for certain tasks to make sure that I am not letting other ones fall through the cracks.  Overall, I’ve been really surprised how those 10 minutes in the morning affects how I work through the rest of the day.

This leaves me wondering what practices I can employ to hold myself accountable to my plan for developing my portfolio over the next year, as I will be working on my own.  I’m debating on holding myself to a scrum like schedule and turning out new features every two weeks, or if there is some better way to handle this.  I’ll let you know as I go along.

Hello America,

After four great years in college at Georgia Tech, I’m left with one year before I graduate to prepare myself for the workforce and beyond.  With this being about the worst time in 50 years to be looking for a job, I’ve decided to make a year long project out of preparing a portfolio to show off my skills and to learn as much as I can in the process.  In addition, I’m aiming to use this blog, and the projects I will work on to begin to make a name for myself and ideally make a little money on the side.  To this end, this is my plan for the fist half of the year:

First three months (June – September):

• Begin writing blog posts about what I am learning over the summer, specifically things others might find interesting or helpful.
• Complete one major web-based programming project.
• Finish reading Code Complete by Steve McConnell.
• Monetize this blog and make enough to cover my bandwidth costs for this site (~$1 a month).

Second three months (September – December):

• Learn a new programming language, possibly Ruby.
• Complete another programming project.
• Begin to get involved with an open source project and at least one local professional organization, on campus or elsewhere.
• Increase revenue from the site to cover total hosting costs (~$12 a month)

I’ll obviously be refining this plan as I go along, but I think this gives me plenty to start with.  Feel free to follow along, and give me feedback as I work on this.  I’d love ideas for projects as well!