A short 2017 review

It’s time for a little 2017 navel gazing. Prepare for a little self-congratulation and a touch of gushing. You’ve been warned. In general my 2017 was a decent one in terms of tech. I was fortunate to be presented a number of opportunities to get involved in projects and chat to people that I’m immensely thankful for and I’m going to mention some of them here to remind myself how lucky you can be.

Let’s start with conferences, I was fortunate enough to attend a handful of them in 2017. Scale Summit was, as always, a great place to chat about our industry. In addition to the usual band of rascals I met Sarah Wells in person for the first time and was blown away by the breadth and depth of her knowledge. She gave a number of excellent talks over 2017 and they’re well worth watching. The inaugural Jeffcon filled in for a lack of Serverless London (fingers crossed for 2018) and was inspiring throughout, from the astounding keynote by Simon Wardley keynote all the way to the after conference chats.

I attended two DevopsDays, London, more about which later, and Stockholm. It was the first in Sweden and the organisers did the community proud. In a moment of annual leave burning I also attended Google Cloud and AWS Summits at the Excel centre. It’s nice to see tech events so close to where I’m from. I finished the year off with the GDS tech away day, DockerCon Europe and Velocity EU.

DevopsDays holds a special place in my heart as the conference and community that introduced me to so many of my peers that I heartily respect. The biggest, lasting contribution, of Patricks for me is building those bridges. When the last “definition of Devops” post is made I’ll still cherish the people I met from that group of very talented folk. That’s one of the reasons I was happy to be involved in the organisation of my second London DevOps. You’d be amazed at the time, energy and passion the organisers, speakers and audience invest in to a DevopsDays event. But it really does show on the day(s).

I was also honoured to be included in the Velocity Europe Program Committee. Velocity has always been one of the important events of industry and to go from budgeting most of a year in advance to attend to being asked to help select from the submitted papers, and even more than that, be a session chair, was something I’m immensely proud of and thankful to James Turnbull for even thinking of me. The speakers, some of who were old hands at large events and some giving their first conference talk (in their second language no less!), were a pleasure to work with and made a nerve wracking day so much better than I could have hoped. It was also a stark reminder of how much I hate speaking in front of a room full of people.

Moving away from gushing over conferences, I published a book. It was a small experiment and it’s been very educational. It’s sold a few copies, made enough to pay for the domain for a few years and led to some interesting conversations with readers. I also wrote a few Alexa skills. While they’re not the more complicated or interesting bits of code from last year they have a bit of a special significance to me. I’m from a very non-technical background so it’s nice for my family to actually see, or in this case hear, something I’ve built.

Other things that helped keep me sane were tech reviewing a couple of books, hopefully soon to be published, and reviewing talk submissions. Some for conferences I was heavily involved in and some for events I wasn’t able to attend. It’s a significant investment of time but nearly every one of them taught me something. Even about technology I consider myself competent in.

I still maintain a small quarterly Pragmatic Investment Plan (PiP), which I started a few years ago, and while it’s more motion than progress these days it does keep me honest and ensure I do at least a little bit of non-work technology each month. Apart from Q1 2017 I surprisingly managed to read a tech book each month, post a handful of articles on my blog, and attend a few user groups here and there. I’ve kept the basics of the PiP for 2018 and I’m hoping it keeps me moving.

My general reading for the year was the worst it’s been for five years. I managed to read, from start to finish, 51 books. Totalling under 15,000 pages. I did have quite a few false starts and unfinished books at the end which didn’t help.

Oddly, my most popular blog post of the year was Non-intuitive downtime and possibly not lost sales. It was mentioned in a lot of weekly newsletters and resulted in quite a bit of traffic. SRE weekly also included it, which was a lovely change of pace from my employer being mentioned in the “Outages” section.

All in all 2017 was a good year for me personally and contained at least one career highlight. In closing I’d like to thank you for reading UnixDaemon, especially if you made it this far down, and let’s hope we both have an awesome 2018.