2019 is starting off in a great place; I’m very happy with the friendships/relationships that I’ve formed in New York over the last couple years (and the ones I’ve maintained via distance), I have a chance to work on a really interesting project at work, and I’m in reasonably good physical shape. The past few years there have often been “low hanging fruits” in my life that desperately needed attention and where I could quickly get very rewarding progress (e.g. having let my weight go). This year I feel the need to carefully select what I want to improve because it will take a lot of work to get significantly better than where I am.
I ended up with three distinct goals for 2019 that can help take me to an even better place:
- Enhance My Just For Fun Project – For the last 4 years I have run a website where my friends can pick NFL Football games (sort of like Fantasy Football). I usually use it as a way to learn the technologies that my team at work has been using at a hands-on level even though I don’t have time to keep up with all of their progress on a line-by-line basis. This year my team is working with such cool technologies that I’ve really learned a lot and built a product that’s pretty good. I’d like to spend the off-season making it robust enough that I can open it up to users who aren’t just my friends. This will require some functional enhancements; a new user interface, the ability to create and administer leagues without messing with the database, a few other odds and ends. Most of the changes though will be creating better DevOps/Testing/Monitoring/Logging so that there are less disruptions. My friends are pretty forgiving with outages and dumb mistakes… but I wouldn’t expect everyone to be.
- Get a Sampling of More Cloud Technologies – My current project has me very focused on Kubernetes on premise. I think I would benefit from a more well-rounded technical background so I can help influence other decisions. With that in mind, I’m going to be working on getting a few AWS certifications and probably a GCP one.
- Get Back in to Non-Technical Reading – My career has gotten a lot more technical in the last 2 years than it was before. My focus on DevOps has only required some of the highest level knowledge of what’s going on in banking, best practices in development/agile, and management techniques. I’ll be looking to modify my regular reading, get through a couple of books that talk about the industry at a much higher level, maybe even get certified in SAFe so that I still feel as at home in the developer’s scrum as I do in the devops scrum.
In addition to those 3, I want to make sure I don’t regress on a few areas of my life that are going well. Most notably continuing to nurture my relationships with people and stay in reasonably good shape. I have a few ways to measure those, but the goals are not remarkable.