2020 Retrospect

2020 is upon us so its time for me to do my yearly recap of how the previous year was and what I am looking forward this year.

• The biggest new thing from 2019 was Kubernetes. For work purposes, I got a chance to setup a working production k8s cluster. It has been an interesting journey till now. Like all new technologies, it is definitely a complex and new way of doing things. Along with k8s, tools like Terraform, Helm were also studied. I think overall, now I have a basic -> intermediate level competency. As an extra experience, I also tried out GKE with personal tutorials/learning.

• With more Golang work in plate, worked on maintaining existing Go based services. In my initial newbie days, I did find the construct a bit weird (coming from Python background) but overtime, I think I have come to appreciate the language for what it is. Leaving aside various negatives that have been discussed every popular forums, its actually quite nice to build server softwares.

• As can be read from some of my other posts, I am a sucker for improving my editing code flows. I seem to have a love and hate relationship with the editor and after trying different ones and different flows, I seem to always come to back it. I did try VS Code as part of Golang work (mostly for the GUI based delve debugging tool) but came back once again to trusty VIM. To that effect, spent some good hours reading up more on how people are using VIM. Surprisingly, there are good number of videos on YouTube that you can watch to something new - even if it is one feature.

• Reading slowed down in first half of 2019 but picked up again in second half. Most of books read were on management for this year. I am planning to move back (if opportunity provides) to taking up a bit more leadership/management roles.

• A new country was added to my travelogue. Visited Canada (Toronto/Montreal) over the summer break.

• Started bicycling again after more than 30 years of never riding a bicycle. Son is growing up and he needs longer rides so along with getting him a new bike as birthday present, I also got my old Meraki provided bike to ride with him.

As you would notice, most of the above introspection has been on positive side. I have had many many many setbacks/failures which I will not delve into. Rest assured, most of the solutions can be easily found online where other people have the same problem and you can implement one of many answers.