Delivering personal development with GitHub Projects

Thoughts from my first personal development firebreak

Table of contents

  1. What is a firebreak sprint?
  2. Part 1: Defining your personal development goals
  3. Part 2: Creating a GitHub Project to support your goals
  4. Part 3: Structuring your GitHub Project for success
  5. Part 4: Maintaining your GitHub Project
  6. Conclusion

Introduction

A personal development firebreak is not a break from work to focus on developing yourself and your skills.

In the context of Agile 'sprint' methodology, it's a break from the focus on deliverables (such as features) and instead a call to attack the problems that slow down development in the abstract.

I took a firebreak in the last weekend of July 2022, and during that time I noticed that GitHub Projects had just launched 'General Access'. This was a big deal for me: I'd been an ardent kanban lover as a student with a blog (I had lots of ideas for blogs and wanted to track their progress from draft stage, alongside course work, at the same time as navigating the applications to academic positions, as you do).

6 years later, I'm now a Data Scientist with quite different concerns and abilities, but the underlying methodology of a glorified TODO list (with helpful structure and integrations to GitHub features) remains relevant.

Thanks for reading! 🚀