Performance Review 2013

I had my performance review on Friday w/ my manager. It went really good. "Keep doing what you're doing." "Keep learning." I can handle that.

We talked a bit about how when we are in our team meetings that she can tell when I have something to say. She said that she can see me formulating my thoughts.

We also talked about all the big projects coming up. I think I've told you about how they are rewriting the main app I document. Every thing is going open source and we have been directed to find an open source tool for our doc. Matthew, the bassist in the band, has lots of experience with open source stuff so he's taking the lead on that. The existing system is going to be around for at least 5 years (so I'm planning on 7) and I'm taking the lead on that. That's the doc set where we write something once, then paste it into each document. I talked about wanting to get to a single source, where there's only one place where a procedure is written so that when there's a global change, it gets added once and, then during the publishing process of whatever tool we are using, the procedure gets updated for each applicable client. I said that I wanted to be out of the current process in a year. To do that, though, I said that we have to get the existing docs using a single template and, basically, converting from using Normal style with manual formatting, to a template where there is no manual formatting. Things like pressing Ctrl+B or pressing to get extra spacing - all that needs to be replaced with definitions of styles that are used across all documents. That way, if we have a style called "Button" and it's defined as Verdana, 12, Bold, and we have to change all instances of it to Courier New, 14, Bold/Italic, then we change it once, in the template, and it ripples through.