End of year, end of the course, so it's time to do a proper update on the three skills I've been tracking.

Focussing

This has genuinely improved. At the start of the year I was writing about Pomodoro like it was some kind of solution — honestly I'd already been using it for ages, it wasn't new. The real issue was never concentration in general, it's that I can't focus on things I don't find interesting. On the group project I could sit and work for hours without thinking about it. On documents like this one, no technique in the world helps. I think that's just how it is and I've stopped pretending otherwise. What actually changed is that I got better at structuring the work I do care about — knowing when I work best and saving the harder technical problems for those windows.

Integrity

This is the one I feel most solid on now. The group project pushed it in ways that individual work doesn't, because when you're building something that four people depend on you actually have to understand what you're doing. There were moments with the Cal.com integration where there was almost nothing useful online for my specific setup, so I had to piece it together from the docs and figure out each part myself. Same with AI — I used it throughout the project but mostly as a starting point or a way to think through a problem, not as something to copy from. When a suggestion didn't fit how I'd built things, I had to catch that, and catching it required actually understanding the code. That's become more of a habit now than something I have to consciously remind myself to do.

Collaborating

Still the hardest one and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I still prefer working alone. But I did get better at it during the group project, partly because I didn't have a choice. I was responsible for the front end and the API, which meant everything connected through me — I had to talk to Dawid about how the database responses should look before I could write the front-end code, and I had to integrate Vlada F.'s Strapi setup into my Vue components. That kind of dependency forces communication whether you want it or not. I also ended up taking on things that weren't my job, like meeting agendas, when they weren't getting done. In hindsight that's probably me reverting to just doing it myself rather than properly collaborating, but at least the communication around it was better than it would have been a year ago.

Overall the year went fine. Choosing three specific skills was the right call — I can actually point to real examples of each one instead of just writing vague things about "growth". Whether the scores on a table reflect any of that is another question.