I've also been at my work now for a year. They do their reviews oddly so I won't catch one until January, but things are going well afaict. I wish I could say my first year in a dev position yielded a lot of surprises or monumental accomplishments, but neither are really true.
I didn't check in very much code over the year. A few maintenance things here and there, a few modifications/enhancements, two fairly minor extensions, a few utilities... I've probably written more code for the C# workshop in the past week.
The main surprise was the difficulty in learning the vagaries of the financial/health care/insurance industry. The terms are many, vague, and seemingly meaningless. I suspect my company was worse than most in this regard, though I also suspect that my initial judgment of difficulty was wrong.
The technical and 'business world' things were all as expected. Having estimations met is quite satisfying. SQL was easy to pickup (from scratch) and the daily use a welcome benefit from the experience. It's probably the most valuable part of the year. Java/Netbeans was fairly easy to pickup enough to work with. And of course there's the year of real work experience for the resume. It won't be enough to put off the doubts I got searching for this job, but it's a start.
For the coming year, I need to work on my business ambition. I'm lazy by nature; really lazy, so doing the little things above and beyond solid consistent work is not in my nature. I do though know that such things will benefit me greatly at this point in my career. Financially, expanding my technical challenges, and responsibility.
Just a simple matter of identifying what to work on and the difficult matter of harnessing the motivation to do so.
