Usually I'm fairly good at recording my achievements through the year, so when it comes to performance reviews or job applications I have a handy go-to list. Last year seems like a year of business as usual. While I did manage to do a few exciting things, mostly I just kept myself going. No big projects, no pushing myself and my skills, no major revelations, just one day at a time. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, sometimes we all need to stay the course and enjoy the smooth sailing. It's possibly a reflection on how much I enjoy project work with clear beginnings and endings (which is why I like design work so much I guess), while regular maintenance work, and daily tasks tend to not seem as glamorous, although they are just as important.
Over the last few years I've managed to stabilise and maintain a robust public library system including public and staff networks, hardware, and LMS. Having a solution you can rely on changes the way you work. Before I was constantly in damage control mode, trying to fix things, create solutions, and work on the fly. While this past year has seen me barely touch the system and has allowed me to think of the future and work ahead rather than behind. It also gives our library service a 'cookie cutter' approach for new or refurbished branches, allowing me to simply deploy a solution quickly and efficiently. A pretty good outcome if I say so myself.
While I enjoy and value the project work when I have it, I need to remind myself that regular maintenance tasks are just as valuable and not to short sell them in my mind. I guess that's what I really learnt in 2018.
With that said, here are some things I achieved and learnt in 2018:
- Presented at VALA 2018 - Giving away free internet is harder than it sounds
- Presented a poster at VALA 2019 - [[Citation Needed]] - publishing local history through MediaWiki
- Won an award for a project
- Managed my first major Spydus LMS upgrade (and nothing went wrong!)
- Migrated our Museum data from Mosaic to Spydus archives and learnt a bunch of stuff along the way.
- Helped organise some great newCardigan cardiParties in Perth
- Created a portable RFID stats recorder using the Arduino programming language (which you can learn how to do at VALA Tech Camp 2019!)
- Removed all the spine labels from the comic collection at work and arranged them by publisher and title (something I've done at a previous library too)