Review of 2019 & plans for 2020 as a software engineer

Let me state the disclaimer that this is not a technical post. Rather it's my own reflections of last year and plans about next year related to my technical life. I was doing this privately from the beginning of my career. This time thought of making it public

2019

Achievements

• vlogging - The biggest achievement of the year was the start of vlogging. I started my first video tutorial with 'text to speech' instead of my voice. But later got the courage to publish in my own voice. 
• Blogging - Also, mostly able to keep up one technical post per week.
• Performance optimization - Refreshed application performance optimization skills. Learned new techniques. 
• Power BI - I learned Power BI and created a dashboard for analyzing IIS logs. Power BI was postponed by me as it was not having much programming elements. Now I understood why everybody going behind Power BI.
• Containers - Though I had blogged about container technology from the very beginning, I never got enough hands own experience. This year I got a good amount of hands-on time. To be frank, not able to get hold of Kubernetes yet.
• Azure - Conscious efforts were put forward Azure during the year. Though not able to achieve the goal of passing the Az-300 exam, I prepared a lot for it. The immediate aim in 2020 would be to pass the same.
• Public events - Similar to previous years attended public events mainly conducted by the Microsoft user groups.
• Coding diagrams - The next big thing I learned and practiced was coding diagrams using PlantUML. Easy to deal with diagraming as an architect.
• Interviews - I was nearly taking 3 interviews per week. Mostly Solutions Architects and cloud specialists. It again enforced my perception that to continue working as Solution Architect in US one doesn't need to be hands-on. But should be a salesperson with a basic / breadth understanding of concepts. There were cloud architects who kinds of started with cloud from its birthday (day 1) but never faced any cloud-specific challenge.
• Enterprise Architecture - It is the year I was slowly getting converted from Solutions Architect to Enterprise Architect or at least had to deal with enterprise architecture. More time I am spending on Enterprise concerns such as protocols, OS versions, HA & DR, AD, AAD, wire sharking than designing solutions. Though I did some solution designs, those were more towards non-functional such as security & infrastructure-related than application functionalities.

2020 - What is ahead?

• Focus on cloud computing, containers & Kubernetes.
• The big thing would be an attempt to present a topic in a public event conducted by Microsoft user groups.
• Pass the AZ-300 certification.
• Linux - mainly for the container world. At least change home machine to Linux
• Taste the feel of real micro-services and serverless in at least one application.
• Learn more and more enterprise practices. Including infrastructure concerns to understand how to run production systems than just building those.
• Continue making 1 blog post per week.
• At least 25% posts to be videos.
• At least 10% posts to external sites such as CodeProject, DZone CSharpCorner, etc..
• Monthly 1-2 hours to personal projects
• Some experiments with IoT boards.

What I am not going to do

It is important to decide what to avoid in this world of drastic changes and fancy technologies

• Blockchain coding - Oh this thing is getting postponed 3rd year.
• WebAssembly - Maybe watching some videos. Not in deep.
• Go, Scala & Python - Same as web assembly.

Updates

2020-01-03

Removed work-related references - There is a policy in my current organization that "employees MUST not identify himself or herself as an employee of the company in a blog or on a social networking site". Though I was not using the company name in this post, people were able to identify. Thus removing the work-related references from this post.