Every year I write up a blog post that’s meant to highlight some of the previous year, but I delayed the 2023 look by a few months because I also had the general thought of total years in mind.

Five years ago I wrote a blog post ”Five Years and a few months in Professional Software Development” and now I am two weeks shy of ten years in professional (being paid) software development. Now I can qualify for those ambitious job postings that ask for ten years experience in .NET! Some of that five years blog post still rings true to my ears and some of it doesn’t, but I’m going to leave that blog post as a historical snapshot until such time as I make one more up-to-date.

Revisiting some of the past

This blog alone has reached over 100 posts on its own. And counting my old blog, I have an even higher total post count. This blog has been my only one since September 2017 and the quality of posts has been inconsistent but I really appreciate having the little snapshots of life and of career throughout the years.

Another little piece to look back on is thinking about the industries that I’ve worked in as a software dev.

• 2014-2015: Agribusiness
• 2015-2017: Healthcare
• 2017-2021: Pet products & services
• 2019: Brief interlude in city transportation.
• 2021-present: Restaurants

During those ten years, I moved to new cities twice. That first move two days after college graduation to a new city was terrifying and I was very fortunate to have a solid job.

Technology trends in 2023 in my career

2023 has been a very consistent year in use of technological frameworks and there hasn’t been significant decrease or increase in overall trends by framework. However, something that these categories may not fully illustrate is the utilization of those in new ways of system thinking, domain modeling, or a production ready system mindset. Nor do these trends really illustrate the increasing array of external software dependencies and integrations that seem to be a natural expectation now.

Maintained:

• C# & .NET. Nothing surprising about this, it’s been part of my career for years.
• macOS I’ve switched to a macbook as my personal laptop and been working on projects in this.
• Linux. I run openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop but mostly been gaming on that. I also run openSUSE Tumbleweed in WSL and that gets more development use.
• SQL. Mostly SQL Server but also a few times jumping into PostgreSQL and others.
• F#. Both personally and professionally which is surprising. I really like F# and it’s the most fun of the languages I consistently use.
• JavaScript Professionally and personally has featured a moderate amount of JavaScript or Typescript of many archeological eras.
• AWS I use AWS professionally and this just keeps increasing.
• Terraform Lots of terraform.

Increased and decreased

• Kubernetes less personally but ever slightly more so professionally starting.

GitHub

Considering side projects, an interesting view might be what my personal GitHub contributions look like: 194 in 2023.

What am I going to do this year?

• I have been visiting and intend to keep visiting more National Parks.
• I’ve started cycling and it’s been a lot of fun. Picked up a gravel bike and been building up endurance making laps at the park.
• Sport fencing is something I’ve just stopped doing. Where I live just doesn’t have a very big scene and I find it wearisome to travel for competitions.

Revisiting last year’s goals

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.

In the summer, I was promoted from Senior level 1 to level 2 at my employer. That validation felt like a measurable milestone of progress in recognition.

Personally, travel more.

I sure did travel more and I really enjoyed seeing more scenic sights and especially National Parks. And I intend to keep visiting more National Parks and I’ve already been doing that in 2024.