2022 What Happened?

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Sat, 31 Dec 2022 22:00:00 +0000

As 2022 draws to a close its time to do my annual look back at what happened.

I am going to talk a bit about my personal life as well as tech things, so if that is not your bag feel free to skip this post and read my more technical articles.

January - I started the year teaching my son to code .
February - I did some work on my website this year, and it is now using Hugo instead of wordpress.
March - I was guest on a Star Trek podcast , hopefully a repeat appearance in the works very soon. I also passed an AWS exam
April - Lots of work with Scratch with my boy
June - Scottish Summit
August - My boys birthday so some coding activities with his Microbit
October - I bought a second hand car and less than a week later it burst into flames, a scary event but no one hurt and everything has since been replaced/repaired.
November - I lost my job
December - Extended time with family for Christmas with a new job starting in January. I sat and narrowly missed passing AZ-204 (Developing Solutions for Azure). I attended DDD North , I attended LeedsSharp and went on a virtual tour of a Microsoft Datacenter.

I don’t know what is in store for 2023 but I am sure it will be equally interesting. The first thing to get my head around is my new job.

So onto my goals for 2023

New job and get my head around all the new stuff I need to learn
Celebrate 10 years of marriage and concentrate on family things
Pass AZ-204 - It was such a close miss that I need to retry this
More coding with my son, he got a laptop for Christmas and would be great to build on what he has learnt so far.
Blog regularly - I doubled the number of blog posts from 2021, but it would be great to keep up the momentum with regular posts of what I am up to.
I recently added an events page, so I need to go to some events. Events like DDD North and Scottish Summit are great, but so are local user groups so a mix of these would be great.

Last year I had the following goals

Video - Not used my green screen yet, would be good to make some time to use this in 2023
Conference - I attended Scottish Summit and DDD North, would be great to go to more like these this year as well
Blog More - Yeah I achieved this, but lets keep doing this.
Metrics - I have done little bits with this over the last year, but not a huge amount.
My personal brand has improved this year as my blog relaunched on the Hugo platform, and I am very happy with its look, probably more I can do.

DDD North

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 18:00:45 +0000

On Saturday 3rd December I attended DDD North . It is a community run conference for Developers (the D’s stand for Developer) and I had a fab time there. Many conferences are going online which is great, however there is nothing quite like chatting over coffee or lunch with fellow Developers about the tech you are learning about, this was probably my favourite thing about the conference.

The first talk I attended was ‘.Net Minimal APIs’ by Kevin Smith . Kevin runs .Net user groups in York and Sheffield so I have heard him speak before. He went through some of the features of minimal APIs. I have briefly experimented with them in .Net 6, however from the sound of things the tech is much improved in .Net 7, with lots of improvements, so this is something I want to give another try.

During the coffee break I managed to have a quick conversation with Nick Chapsas . Nick has a YouTube channel that my colleagues at work have been sharing during our weekly knowledge share sessions. It was great to chat with someone that I have been watching on YouTube.

The second talk was ‘When microservices go bad’ by Andy Clark . This talk was a discussion of the different ways you can use Polly , Carl Franklin of .NetRocks fame has mentioned Polly a few times on the show, so this was a good talk to explain the different ways it can be used.

The third talk was ‘Don’t put your messages in a bottle; Implement messaging patterns’ by Eldert Grootenboer , he should have been joined by Olena Borzenko however she was unable to travel (didn’t catch exactly why, I think she was from Ukraine or working in Ukraine and Visa’s from that part of the world are a problem at the moment). This was a talk all about message queues and the patterns and practises you should implement. I don’t know much about queues, having only recently started using AWS SQS messages recently so this was useful to put that work into context. The slides from this talk are available here

Lunch was next and the food was excellent. I found myself sitting with Jamie Taylor (from the Tabs and Spaces podcast), Craig Pickles , Chris Sainty and a few others. There was a fascinating discussion on Blazor, .Net and how Microsoft introduces new stuff. Really appreciate being able to listen in on such an interesting discussion.

The fourth talk was ‘Why don’t people seem to be able to diagnose problems these days?’ by Richard Fennell . This was a fascinating walk through computer history and the challenges of finding where the problem is. The slides from this talk are available here

The last talk was ‘Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion’ by Jamie Taylor who I had met at lunch. This was a fascinating look at how we place barriers between ourselves as Developers and the users of the software. It expanded into ethics, code of conduct and doing good.

It was a great event so thank you DDD North for all your hard work, I look forward to the next one. I have lots to go away and think about.

2022-12 on Funky Si's Test

2022 What Happened?

DDD North