# Q4 2024 Reflection - What Went Well, What Didn't

**Author**: Sarah Chen
**Date**: 2025-01-05
**Type**: Personal Reflection

## Wins

### Technical Excellence
- Successfully launched real-time analytics dashboard (2M events/day)
- Reduced API latency by 60% through caching strategy
- Zero production incidents in November (first time ever!)
- Migrated 80% of services to Kubernetes

### Team Growth
- Hired 2 senior engineers (Mike, Alice)
- Mentored 3 junior developers
- Improved code review culture - avg review time down from 2 days to 4 hours
- Team satisfaction score: 4.2/5 (up from 3.8)

### Personal Development
- Completed AWS Solutions Architect certification
- Spoke at KubeCon (talk well-received)
- Started weekly 1:1s with all reports
- Read 8 technical books

## Challenges

### Scope Creep
- Q4 initially planned 3 major features, delivered 6
- Burned out in November working 60-hour weeks
- Learned: Need to push back on unrealistic timelines

### Communication Gaps
- Product-Engineering alignment issues in October
- Resulted in 2 weeks of rework on customer dashboard
- Lesson: Involve PM earlier in technical design

### Technical Debt
- Deferred authentication service refactor (now causing issues)
- Accumulated 120 TODO comments in codebase
- Need Q1 focus on cleanup

## Q1 2025 Priorities

### Focus Areas
1. **API Modernization** - GraphQL migration
2. **Database Scaling** - TiDB evaluation and migration
3. **Team Sustainability** - Reduce on-call burden
4. **Technical Debt** - Dedicated 20% time for cleanup

### Personal Goals
- Improve work-life balance (no weekends)
- Delegate more (trust the team)
- Deep dive into distributed systems (reading list prepared)
- Publish 1 blog post per month

### Team Goals
- Hire 1 staff engineer
- Improve deployment frequency (target: daily)
- Reduce incident MTTR to < 30 minutes
- Establish internal tech talks (bi-weekly)

## Gratitude
Grateful for supportive team, patient stakeholders, and interesting technical challenges. Looking forward to Q1!
