How do you, as a developer, set measurable goals for yourself, being it at work or in your side hobbie?
It takes some practice to define todo list items that are achievable in a consistent fixed amount of time. But it's a worthy practice. Being able to boil a big abstract project into small component parts is (IMO) one of the most important skills of being a developer.
What I lack in experience I make for in other ways: I daydream all the time about the ideal scenario regardless of skill, and write the code to make that happen ramping up the skill. Then I daydream all the time about the worst scenario to ruin the perfect scenario, and write the code to prevent that from happening.
After a daydreaming session, I have a bunch of behaviors to be exhibited by the code to deal with different triggers, where the absence of a trigger can be a trigger.
Murphy's law states that things that can go wrong will go wrong. There's another law that states: "Even things that can't go wrong, do". Having that mindset makes me think of a lot of actionable goals to make real, and potential bugs to kill in the egg.
A flyback diode and the dying gasp are some of the most beautiful things I've seen. Designing, whether in hardware or software, for power outages is a thing.
I also think about space probes all the time and I try hard not to fall into Nietzsche's "admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it."
It sucks to know of software that brushes off solar flares for 40+ years like it's nothing and have mine die because of unicode.
Not dying because of unicode is a measurable, actionable, goal.
Ignoring fluctuations in performance at a day level (somedays no progress goes forward and it's more reading and thinking, come in the next day and everything just lines up and can power through a ton of work), I find that by virtue of working in a ticket based environment (user stories, anything involving Jira and/or Trello etc.) provides enough day to day ability to track how you go, so I like to set goals like in 12 months I want to have learned a new framework and worked on a project with it, or in the next 3 months I want to have re-factored this legacy code etc.
Goals to me should always extend past what you're expected to do, and instead show what you want to do in addition, whilst still adding value to the org you're at.
1. Forecasting accuracy -- Given a goal estimate how long it will take. Try to minimize the amount of time it takes.
2. Streaking -- Try to minimize the amount of time you're not in the routine. E.g. One deployment a week for 2 years straight.
3. Remembering -- Try to minimize the amount of time you need to re-look things up. This generally refers to documentation, patterns, etc.
There are other things I tried but they're too subjective unfortunately.
Also, it's real easy to rush and put in shit code and add bugs and all kinds of other problems.
It's very hard to "score" developer performance even for your self.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
two of the most widely used being Scrum and Kanban
which could be used to track how your doing against your self. although recommended not to be used for evaluating employees so take with a grain of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart
User stories in a "story map" (Kanban board) with labels and/or milestones for epics, flights, themes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story#Story_map
Software Development > Requirements Management > Agile Modeling > User Story: https://wrdrd.github.io/docs/consulting/software-development...