Here I’m mostly going to focus on professional achievements.

Here’s the short list, and then details in sections below.

• Less blog posts and speaking
• Technology trends in 2022 in my career
• GitHub
• Revisiting some of the past
• Other things I’ve been doing this year.
• Revisiting last year’s goals
• What am I going to do this year?

Less blog posts and speaking

My blog has succeeded in its purpose. My own words have been quoted back to me after I had forgotten I wrote them.

Only a few blog posts happened this year. That’s ok. I’ve been doing other stuff this year and sometimes it’s just good to take a year to do that.

One public conference talk happened this year at CodeStock 2022 after a two year break from speaking. I enjoyed doing that talk and it felt well received but I haven’t done any other this year.

Technology trends in 2021 in my career

Increased

• AWS I use AWS profesionally and this just keeps increasing.
• JavaScript Professionally and personally has featured a lot more JavaScript of various eras.
• Terraform Lots of terraform.
• macOS I’ve switched to a macbook as my personal laptop and been working on projects in this.

Maintained:

• Golang I’ve been working on a side project in Go, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
• Linux. Until recently, I was running openSUSE Tumbleweed but now I’ve stopped using Linux for desktop and been using it for server only.
• SQL. Mostly SQL Server but also a few times jumping into PostgreSQL and others.
• C# & .NET. Nothing surprising about this, it’s been part of my career for years.
• F#. Less personally, more professionally.

Decreased:

• Azure. I’ve left Azure profesionally and then migrated all my personal projects off of Azure. Leaving it behind for now.

GitHub

Considering side projects, an interesting view might be what my personal GitHub contributions look like: 226 in 2022 so far.

Revisiting some of the past

Over the past few hours I’ve been scanning old articles on both this blog and a static snapshot of my previous old Wordpress blog and even further back to a classic google site from over a dozen years ago where I once worked on game development before I ever went to college.

I do appreciate being able to go back in history because I’ve found screenshots and video captures of what was probably my first software demo. This game project was another Real-Time-Strategy game attempt that didn’t get much further than pathfinding and units awkwardly walking (sliding) around a map.

Other things I’ve been doing this year.

I don’t normally post a ton of photos of other things but two notable things are boardgames and backpacking.

Revisiting last year’s goals

What I said last year was:

I’ve had the senior honorific in my job titles for some years now. During this time I’ve learned many things, made many mistakes, changed some views, and yet I still have so much more to learn. I can never become complacent in the status quo. I must always strive to understand more. To this purpose, I have every intent of a professional goal in stepping it up this year with a formal recognition as a technical leader.

I have a very strong interest in high-traffic, large-scale backend distributed systems. For the most part, my career is shifting towards more of a focus on that, and I enjoy it.

This year has been the biggest leap in large system knowledge I have ever had. The goal of a technical leader is always a moving target though so there’s more to be learned and to be done. Formal recognition as a technical leader is always hard to measure and I know that.

What am I going to do this year?

Personally, travel more. Profesionally, be consistent.