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

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

• Continued Microsoft MVP
• Decreased blog traffic
• Speaking at conferences and at meetups and at work
• Technology trends in 2021 in my career
• Other Education and Experiences
• Shift in side projects
• GitHub
• Goals

Continued Microsoft MVP

I became a Microsoft MVP in 2018, and then I got it again in 2021. I’ve met a lot of people because of that and it’s helped make introductions more easily. I’m very fortunate. However, I have rather stopped logging contributions therefore I don’t expect to keep it again.

Decreased blog traffic

I published 22 blog posts in 2021 on topics mostly around Kubernetes and game development.

Blog traffic definitely decreased as my most popular blog posts have aged past most relevance. Angular, Quartz.NET, Prometheus, and now one of the Kubernetes blog posts have all been the most popular topics.

I don’t expect to know in the future since I have removed Google Analytics, and I am not tracking traffic anymore.

Speaking at conferences and at meetups and at work

I didn’t give any talks in 2021. I’ve already started working on 2022 talks and I will be returning to speaking.

Technology trends in 2021 in my career

Increased

• Kubernetes I have a kubernetes cluster at home that I’m constantly messing around with. I’ve done a couple blog posts, and I expect to have more.
• Golang I’ve been working on a side project in Go, and I’ve really enjoyed it.
• AWS I started working on AWS certs, and then it’s increased professionally.

Maintained:

• Linux. openSUSE Tumbleweed has been running on my personal desktop for most of the year. Apart from some audio issues, it’s been working quite well.
• Azure. A lot of Azure in the first half of the year, then this has taken a sudden nose-dive when I started a new job.
• SQL. I’ve done a lot of SQL performance tuning and investigation, and general SQL Server administration this year on many projects. That was mostly the first half of the year though.
• C# & .NET. Nothing surprising about this, it’s been part of my career for years.
• ReactJS. ReactJS has been on some personal projects and then I’ve also done some professionally.
• F#. I have a lot of personal projects in F# but only my game project is being worked on.

Decreased:

• Salesforce. I’m leaving this behind.
• Oracle and Oracle E-Business-Suite. I’m leaving this behind.

Other Education and Experiences

It’s impossible to capture all progress made purely in technological buzzwords above. So I want to call out some education and experiences this year.

Remote Work

I’ve worked remote this entire year. I do not want to return to an office, and I don’t expect to since I live quite far away from any office at work.

Shift in side projects

Side projects, continuing education, and a general hustle outside work hours is a frequent visitor of people I see in the software development space. To some extent, I’m a part of that. But as time has gone on, I find that I just don’t care much about the visibility. Towards that, how I’ve been working on things has shifted: I only work on things that I want to work on. I have two main side projects which has been fun to work on them as I feel like it without a huge amount of blogging or talking about them. I’m really focusing on getting a complete product out there.

GitHub

While I’m talking about side projects, an interesting view might be what my personal GitHub contributions look like: 268 in 2021.

Goals

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.

Summary

I’m not going to list out details of jobs, I’ll leave that to my LinkedIn. 2021 was a strong but quiet year for me. Whatever 2022 holds for me, the best I can do is to face it with a strong attitude. Here’s to hoping for a good 2022!