For about the past year I’ve been putting my time towards planning and managing projects and less time with implementation.

I was stubborn in accepting I didn’t have enough time to both manage and code. I learned the hard way.

I tried to code out a complex solution that ended up taking a long time to finish, because I kept getting pulled away. After that, I focused more on coaching. Guiding my developers to make good decisions has become a more effective use of our time.

One challenge with this approach is my coding skills are becoming a little rusty. My memory of higher level design is fine, but my familiarity with the code base and specific implementation has started to become fuzzy.

Another challenge is keeping up to speed on new features that come out for languages and frameworks. Last year I had an instance that caused a little conflict when I wasn’t familiar with with some new React features that had been announced the year before.

There is a question I’m hoping to get an answer for this year; is it possible to be a technical lead and a manager?

I’ve heard of positions that are both, but my personal experience has shown me it’s difficult and probably best there’s a separation of the two.

Regardless of if I hold on to those responsibilities or not, I want to keep my skills up to date. And that requires some routine maintenance.

I think it’s best to focus on one area at a time, which has me a little torn. Do I put that attention on work or hobby? That’s a topic to delve into more in another post. For now, I’m going to side with work and explore Drupal more.

I was tempted to say Drupal and React, but I need to limit myself to reasonable goals.

Putting in any time to perform any maintenance is an improvement over the past two months.

My target is to get Drupal setup in an environment to test out the layout builder and see how their database schema is structured.

Wish me luck!