It's self-evaluation time at Artsy. I've never done this before, and it's kind of scary, but after realizing how remarkably nice mine was I thought it'd be worth sharing. I added a few notes for context (👋 they look like this).
How did you perform on your business and personal development goals last quarter?
- I've made significant improvement to my skills working in public with other Artsy engineers. I've pushed up a lot of in-progress work to get eyes on it sooner, and I've worked to add a lot of context to my PRs. This openness has helped me identify how to slice down work collaboratively instead of putting it all on myself to figure out.
- I've dedicated significantly more time to upkeep and cross-team work. I'm the primary maintainer of diffusion and convection dependencies (👋 two projects our team works with). I've taken over as point person for integrity (👋 an end-to-end testing project). I facilitated an engineering-wide retro and a team retro for Purchase (👋 a team I'm not on).
- I've become more active and more consistent with making external impact. I was a main contributor to the launch of Artsy Engineering Radio. I took over writing office hours from [redacted], and [redacted] and I have been working regularly on blog posts together. I took primary ownership of the Relay Peer Learning group (👋 we're building materials for learning Relay) and have been regularly making progress building a curriculum.
What business and personal development goals would you like to work on next quarter?
- Grow Artsy Engineering Radio. Make it better from a listener's perspective by improving audio & refining the content. Develop an audience. Improve the website experience by giving it & its episodes a dedicated home, embedding audio on episode pages, and maybe including transcripts.
- Continue growth on cross-team work. Devote time to integrity (👋 an end-to-end testing project) to eliminate recurring flaky tests. Get at least one module of the Relay Peer Learning curriculum (👋 we're building materials for learning Relay) complete. Solicit more help with developing the curriculum.
- Foster more frequent contributions to the Artsy blog.
Maybe your self-evaluations always look like this...mine do not. One thing I sincerely appreciate about Artsy is that I can be a very harsh self-critic in my reviews — I have never felt like I need to focus on the good things to avoid being punished in my career advancement.
And ooooooooo boy am I good at being a self-critic. Contrast my glowing self-eval above with some of these highlights from past reviews:
- Contributing to Artsy's ecosystem beyond my team was a mixed bag. I did contribute to the large typography update. My interest in integrity (👋 an end-to-end testing project) and the figma palette plugin (👋 a stalled project intended to make it easier to use our design system) dwindled, though, and I did not partake in the first Future Friday (👋 a fortnightly thing we do for upkeep) due to feeling like I needed to focus on direct product work.
- Find an approach to cross-organization impact that works for me.
- Relax my need to make a point when I'm feeling my autonomy encroached, assuming it's not threatening my happiness.
- Communicate opinions effectively & convincingly. I find myself often feeling unheard when sharing my opinions. I don't believe that minds can be changed very easily, but I don't try very hard to change them.
- Communicate past experiences in a way that's useful to the team. I find myself with pertinent experience but unable to communicate the value of it to my team.
- Whether it's code that could be rewritten or build processes that could be improved, I have a high tolerance for inconvenience. I could make more impact to the team if I were to smooth out the rough edges when I run into them, instead of accepting them as they are.
- I tend to get tunnel-vision when I'm working on a project, and defer work that isn't directly related to my project with the hope that I'll pick it up in between projects. I don't often pick this work up in between projects either, because I get eager to get back to project work. This same effect prevents me from blogging more, which I think is important, I want to do, but I still don't find time for.
All this to say...I'm not really sure what's up with this quarter's self-evaluation. It feels different.
I hope you also get to say nice things about yourself. It feels good.