Past Year Review (2020)

The end of the year has come, so it’s time to look back and sum up what has happened and what has been achieved.

Let’s say that everyone would like to forget 2020, what a year! 2021, let’s jump into the unknown.

Following my previous New Year’s Resolution, I’ve continued with the same kind of schedule and process, with some adjustments along the way.

I managed it good enough, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ve got satisfied with my achievements.

Rules

These are the “rules” I’ve implicitly followed without actually define them at the beginning. So basically there were no explicit rules, and that made it easier for me to commit to a huge plan.

• I have no pressure whatsoever
  • I can add/switch/cancel tasks at any time
  • Use Thanos Gauntlet every 2 months, and half the items in the list
• I have to define an outline
• Plan items on the calendar (optional)
• No notifications
• Skip stages and focus on kanban approach
• It’s my own personal planning
  • Tend to spend as less as possible, so not to feel guilty about it
  • Not squeeze every minute to advance with the task
  • Define Top 3 Priority for the week
  • Max 3 tracks in any given time
• Track percentage progresses
• Highlight Personal vs Career items
• Since colour feedback is important I’ve used the following (loose) ranges to give me more confidence
  • <25% is red
  • <65% is orange
  • >65% is green

Report

• Read 12 Books
  1. Building Secure and Reliable Systems
  2. Cloud Native Patterns
  3. Designing Distributed Systems
  4. Effective DevOps
  5. Infrastructure as Code
  6. Practical DevOps
  7. Site Reliability Engineering
  8. Software Project Estimation
  9. The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit
  10. The Site Reliability Workbook
  11. The Art Of War
  12. WASEC
• Certifications Plan (“thanks” to the pandemic I’ve pushed a bit):
  1. 1. APM Fundamentals – Limited Offer
     2. Advanced Distributed Systems Design using SOA & DDD
     3. Anomaly Detection for Cybersecurity – Limited Offer
     4. Certified Network Security Specialist
     5. Cybersecurity Essentials
     6. ECE Fundamentals – Limited Offer
     7. Entrepreneurship
     8. Fundamentals of Securing Elasticsearch – Limited Offer
     9. Intro to Cybersecurity
     10. Introduction to CyberSecurity
     11. Introduction to Observability: Logging – Limited Offer
     12. Introduction to Redis Data Structures
     13. Kibana Fundamentals – Limited Offer
     14. Observability Fundamentals – Limited Offer
     15. Reactive Architecture(1): Introduction to Reactive Systems
     16. Reactive Architecture(2): Domain Driven Design
     17. Reactive Architecture(3): Reactive Microservices
     18. Reactive Architecture(4): Building Scalable Systems
     19. Reactive Architecture(5): Distributed Messaging Patterns
     20. Reactive Architecture(6): CQRS & Event Sourcing
     21. RediSearch
     22. Redis Streams
     23. SIEM Fundamentals – Limited Offer
     24. Security+
     25. The Go Workshop
• Problem Solving Coding Tests: Got Silver Badge on Hacker Rank
• Watch Video Courses: over 70 hours
• Published 2 Ebooks
  • 10x Software Engineer
  • Practical Estimates
• Write Blog Posts: 3 posts
• Inbox 0 (from 12k+ emails)
• Extras (non-quantitative)
  • Parenting
  • Stepped Down as CTO
  • Changed company (+ switched to remote)
  • Uninstalled Twitter & Facebook from my smartphone
  • Learn(ing) Touch Typing
  • Being involved more on Open Source
    • Badge Poser
    • Code Challenge Review Checklist
    • COVID-19 Spreading in Italy
    • Developer’s Learning Path
    • Go Proxy Cache
    • Nginx & Lua Docker Container
  • Held a talk at a local meetup PUG Roma
  • Wrote a couple more of ebooks

Next Year

I’ll keep doing the same kind of planning, with few more adjustments.

As a brief outline, this would be my 2021:

• Become father for the second time
• Crawl out of my house (damn you COVID-19) and start doing some exercises.
• Create a couple of workshops
• Crowdfunding and writing v2.0 of 10x SE.
• Launch a Newsletter
• Mentoring
• Obtain certifications about Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform.

Let’s see how it turns out. Stay tuned ?