As the New Year approaches and people start to comment “I can’t believe it’s November”, thoughts start to turn to New Year’s Resolutions and things not accomplished in this year.

Whilst I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions per se, rather I try to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement, the end of the year is a great time for reflection.

At the start of each year, I make use of the Three Wins Technique to think about 3 goals (aka “wins”) for the year.

Whether you like to make New Year’s Resolutions, use the 3 Wins or another technique, there’s one thing that a lot of people don’t seem to do…

…and that’s to write them down.

It sounds silly, “I know what I want to do next year”, but for some reason, somehow, writing down your goals gives them power.

You could write them on sticky notes and put them on your bathroom mirror so you see them every day. You could write them on a bit of paper and keep them in your wallet, purse, handbag, backpack, etc. You could (as I do) have a OneNote page for every year with my 3 Wins listed at the top with check boxes next to them.

The important thing is to write them down.

Since I started writing down what I wanted to achieve, I have achieved more. Maybe not everything, but still more.

I’m not saying “write it down and trust in manifestation”, you’ve still got to do the work, but at least start by writing down what you want to achieve.

If you think this sounds silly, why not give it a go anyway? Take your goals, write them down,and see what happens…

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If you’re getting started with .NET or you’ve done some testing but want to know how to put it all together and also learn some additional tools then the new xUnit.net testing path from Pluralsight may be of interest (you can also get started viewing for free with a trial).

The path currently has the following individual courses (including some of my courses) taking you right from the basics of xUnit.net to more advanced techniques:

• Testing .NET Code with xUnit.net: Getting Started
• Mocking in .NET Core Unit Tests with Moq: Getting Started
• Creating Maintainable Contexts for Automated Testing
• Writing Testable Code
• Building a Pragmatic Unit Test Suite
• Improving Unit Tests with Fluent Assertions
• Better .NET Unit Tests with AutoFixture: Get Started
• Approval Tests for .NET

If you’re already skilled with xUnit.net you may find some of the other courses in the path useful.

You can start watching with a Pluralsight free trial.

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If you don’t have a Pluralsight subscription and you want to watch my courses you can this weekend for FREE!

Click the ad below to get started and then once you've signed up for your free weekend, head over to MY LIST OF COURSES to get started!

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Knowing what you need to know is hard. Sometimes harder than the learning itself.

Many years ago I was getting started with .NET v1 and .NET unit testing, Agile had recently been “invented” and I had a printout of the agile manifesto on the office wall. I was also learning Test Driven Development (TDD), mocking, unit testing frameworks, assertions, data driven testing.

I remember it being a little overwhelming at times, so much to learn with fragments of information scattered around but no clearly defined path to follow to get where I knew I wanted to be: proficient and efficient in writing high quality, tested and testable code.

Today things are a little easier but there can still be the: “I don’t know what I need to know”.

This is where skills paths from Pluralsight can be super helpful. I wish I had had them all those years ago.

A path is a curated collection of courses in a specific order to get you to where you need to be for a specific learning goal.

I’m super proud to have contributed to the C# Unit Testing with NUnit Pluralsight path which at the time of writing you can start to watch for free with a Pluralsight free trial.

While it’s certainly possible that you could find the information and learn the topics yourself, you would also waste so much time in getting the information from disparate sources and trying to “meta learn” what it is you don’t know. Ultimately it depends on how much free time you have and how efficient you want to be at learning. You should always keep the end goal in mind and weigh up the costs/benefits/risks of the different ways of getting to that goal. If you want to learn to “how to write clean, testable code, all the way from writing your first test to mocking out dependencies to developing a pragmatic suite of unit tests for your application” then the C# Unit Testing with NUnit path may be your most efficient approach to get to your goal.

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I started using the Three Wins Technique about five years ago. It has proven to be a simple technique to help me focus on, and deliver, what is important.

The Three Wins Technique is very simple to implement, you can do it on paper, sticky notes, OneNote, Evernote or any other tool for that matter. You can read more about it in this 2014 article. I first learned about the concept from Getting Results the Agile Way, and while I don’t use that whole system, I’ve found that using the idea of three wins is beneficial as a standalone technique.

A Quick Overview of the Three Wins Technique

Essentially you define (and actually write down) what three things you want to get done. Sounds simple but it can be incredibly powerful when done properly. The wins should not just be simply tasks to be ticked off, they should be “wins” – things that make you feel a sense of accomplishment and progress when you complete them.

How I Use the Three Wins Technique

Wins can be defined for whatever timeframe you want (weekly, monthly, etc.). I define wins at four levels:

1. What are the 3 wins for this year (I define these in January each year).
2. What are the 3 wins for this month (defined at the start of each month).
3. What are the 3 wins for this week (defined on Monday morning).
4. What are the 3 wins for today.

When defining the daily wins I glance at this week’s wins. When I’m, writing down this week’s 3 wins I glance at this month’s wins. When I’m writing down this month’s wins I glance at this year’s 3 wins.

This method means that the overarching wins for the year are always kept in mind when defining more granular wins. The more granular wins (daily, weekly) should usually contribute to progress on the year’s wins. This isn’t always the case though as other things still need to be done that don’t directly contribute to a yearly win.

If you find that your more granular wins are almost never contributing to the yearly wins then you either have a problem with your focus or incorrect or unrealistic yearly wins. - Tweet This

I use OneNote for most of my note taking/planning/etc. Below is a screenshot mock-up of what my 3 wins page looks like, I create a new page at the start of each year so I can look back at all the wins from the previous years.

Notice in the preceding screenshot, one of the Jan wins is marked with a “!” – I use this when I fail to achieve a win, this helps me to notice failure patterns.

You could have separate 3 wins pages for work life, personal life, fitness/health, etc. or combine categories – whatever works best for you. I tend to use the technique for work-related things, but given the success I’ve had with it I should probably start using it in other areas of my life. I may also start to create 3 wins for the decade to provide some long term perspective.

If you give this technique a try and find it useful, please share this page with your fellow developers, friends, and colleagues.

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Whilst I’m not personally a fan of New Year’s Resolutions, preferring instead to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement, the end of a calendar year is as good a time as any to do a 12 month retrospective and think about the future.

Below are a number of resources you may find helpful to make 2019 your best year yet, along with some of the things I’m currently learning/implementing in my quest for personal development.

2018 Book List

These are some of the books I read in 2018 that I found helpful and that have influenced my thinking and personal growth:

• Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual (Jocko Willink). Learn to understand that discipline in the present gives you more freedom in the future.
• The Inner Game of Tennis (W. Timothy Gallwey). More about physical development/performance but the ideas transcend into anything you want to learn.
• Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl). Harrowing account of Nazi concentration camps infused with what it means to have real meaning in your life.
• Principles: Life and Work (Ray Dalio). Ray Dalio is the founder of one of the biggest and highest performing hedge funds in the world, this book shows the life and work principles the author has developed and also introduces the fascinating idea that you can run your life based on a set of your own written down principles.
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win (Jocko Willink  & Leif Babin). This should be required reading for anyone managing/leading other people, and for anyone wanting to feel like they are more in control of their life by not making excuses.

Personal Growth Podcasts

My 4 go-to podcasts (in no particular order) for physical, mental, and career growth:

• Jocko Podcast. Leadership, discipline, inspiration, service.
• Mind Pump Media Podcast. Fitness, health, weight lifting, entertainment.
• Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Health, wellness, spirituality, self quantification, living your best life.
• The Tim Ferriss Show. Interviews with world class performers

Don’t Code Tired Articles

The following are articles on this blog:

• Investing In You
• Discipline Equals Freedom
• Starting Where You're At

What I’m Working On Implementing At the Moment

These are things I’m trialling, working on implementing, working on improving, or plan to implement in the near future:

• Regular daily meditation (I’m currently trying the Mindvalley 6 Phase Meditation Quest)
• Early to bed, early to rise (somewhere between 4:30 AM and 6AM – not sure yet) Effectively swapping some mindless TV/YouTube/XBox gaming at night for productive time in the morning.
• Learning to deadlift and working on flexibility to allow my to do this
• Generally: reducing waste, simplification, balanced minimalism in regards to ownership of things, saving/investing more money, reading more, learning more.

Living Your Best Life

I hope the preceding things prove to be useful, inspirational, or interesting to you.

I wish you all the best for the coming year and hope that your 2019 brings you closer to being able to live your best life.

Best wishes, Jason.

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Someone says to you: "you must be doing agile, continuous integration, continuous deployment, automated testing, test driven development, etc. etc. etc. or you're doing it wrong".

For any sufficiently complex application you’re building it's likely that the above things, and more, will be beneficial.

The problem is if you’re not doing any of these things and you feel overwhelmed where do you start?

You start where you're at.

build on each success with subsequent success

I remember watching Ray Mears on TV once and he used the acronym STOP to remember what to do if you get lost or stranded:

• (S)top
• (T)hink
• (O)rient
• (P)lan

If you feel overwhelmed this may be a useful acronym to help you start where you're at.

Accepting where you are now and starting where you're at can help remove negative feelings and the feeling of being overwhelmed and not being "good enough" at your job.

This of course doesn't mean that you should accept unprofessional practices and not try to improve things, it simply means acknowledging without judgement where you are now and then moving forward to improve things for the future.

You can start with the "big rocks", the more important or foundational things such as making sure you're using adequate source control. Maybe then move to implementing a basic continuous integration build. Maybe then start to add some automated tests, etc. etc.

Do things incrementally and build on each success with subsequent success.

To create the change you desire, you may have to invest in you along the way, develop an understanding that discipline equal freedom, and also ask yourself the question “what would easy be like?”.

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One of the books I read this year was Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual by Jocko Willink.

The overarching concept in the book is that if you have discipline now, in the present, this will result in greater freedom in the future.

This could be having the discipline to work out/lift weights; in the future this will most likely result in the freedom to move more with less pain/lift heavy things/go trekking/kayaking on holiday, etc.

This could be having the financial discipline to regularly save/invest money rather that spend everything you earn; in the future this will most likely result in having the freedom to (semi)retire early, not have to work in a job you don't like, etc.

I think the reason this book resonated with me personally is that it helped focus the outlook I already had on investing in the future/thinking longer term.

This concept can also be applied to software development. Disciplined software development now, will most probably lead to greater freedom in the future to make changes or add new features.

As an example, having the discipline to create automated tests can help give you the freedom in the future to make changes without having to perform a load of manual testing or worry about what may have broken unknowingly.

Another example: having the discipline to refactor code as you are working on the current feature/bug to keep the code as clean as possible will most probably give you the freedom to change it more easily in the future.

If you are a manager: having the discipline to allocate time for you team to train/learn/get better even when faced with pressure to deliver will most probably result in the freedom to deliver more in the future.

The concept can also be applied to non-coding practices such as having the discipline to hold a stand up meeting every day, engage business/users/stakeholders regularly, etc.

You can also flip this concept on its head and instead ask: in the future, what aspects would I like more freedom in: in one month, in one year, in 10 years? Let the answers to this question guide you when deciding on what it is you need to be more disciplined on today or this week to make manifest those desired freedoms in the future.

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In business/personal coaching there is an idea of a “wheel of life”. The idea is that you evaluate different dimensions of your life and plot them on a wheel. Ideally the wheel should be balanced (and as large) as possible. If the wheel is crooked, you know what areas need to be improved to create a better wheel that turns more easily. When the wheel turns more easily, you get better results.

In a similar vein, the Software Development Wheel allows you to evaluate your overall software development  experience.

The tool below can be used by individual developers, the software development team as a whole, or team leaders/managers.

To generate your own wheel fill out the form below.

Each dimension is rated from 1 (“very little or none”) to 5 (“awesome, doing everything possible”) and descriptions for the dimensions are included below.

Be sure to share this page with your fellow developers, team leaders, and management as it’s a great way to start a conversation about how to improve things.

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The 2018 Stack Overflow Developer Survey was recently released.

This article summarizes some interesting points that .NET developers may find interesting, in additional to some other general items of potential  interest.

.NET Points of Interest

• C# is the 8th most popular programming language among professional developers at 35.3%.
• TypeScript is the 12th most popular language among profession developers at 18.3%
• VB.NET is the 18th most popular programming language at 6.9%.
• .NET Core is the 4th most popular framework among professional developers at 27.2%.
• SQL Server is the 2nd most used database among professional developers  at 41.6%.
• Windows Desktop or Server is the 2nd most developed-for platform among professional developers  at 35.2%.
• Azure is the 10th most developed-for platform among professional developers at 11.4%.
• TypeScript is the 4th most loved language at 67%.
• C# is the 8th most loved language.
• VB.NET is the 4th most dreaded language
• .NET Core is the 5th most loved framework, the 8th most dreaded framework, and the 5th most wanted framework.
• Azure is the 5th most loved database (Tables, CosmosDB, SQL, etc.)
• SQL Server is the 10th most loved database.
• Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are the top two most popular development environments respectively (among all respondents).
• Professional developers primarily use Windows (49.4%) as their development operating system.
• F# is associated with the highest salary worldwide, with C# 16th highest.
• .NET development technologies cluster around C#, Azure, .NET Core, SQL Server etc.

General Points of Interest

• 52.7% of developers spend 9-12 hours per day on a computer.
• 37.4% of developers don’t typically exercise.
• 93.1% of professional developers identify as male.
• 74.3% of professional developers identify as white or of European descent.
• 85.9% of professional developers use Agile development methodologies.
• 88.4% of professional developers use Git for version control.

The survey offers a wealth of additional information and you can find the full set of results over at Stack Overflow.

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