Review of 2020 & plans for 2021 as a software engineer

 As I do every year, this time also I did the review of last year and planned the new year 2021. That said, 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. Last time onwards making it public.

Below are the goals from 2020 as published last year with the status marked 

2020 - What was planned?

• ✔️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.
• There were virtual meetups. So Covid-19 is not an excuse
• ❌Pass the AZ-300 certification.
• Learned a lot
• ✔️Linux - mainly for the container world. At least change home machine to Linux
• Got Raspberry Pi 4 and it is running as Home NAS using Linux-based Raspbian OS.
• ✔️Taste the feel of real micro-services and serverless in at least one application.
• Not a big scale but there are some.
• ✔️Learn more and more enterprise practices. Including infrastructure concerns to understand how to run production systems than just building those.
• Good exposure with the disaster recovery space.
• ✔️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
• Converted my personal portfolio site to JAMstack technology using Hugo. It is deployed.
• ✔️Some experiments with IoT boards.
• Raspberry Pi 4 board basics

Additional achievements

• Learned Hugo a static site generator for JAMstack
• Automated the setup of dev machine using Chocolatey
• GitHub actions. Just consuming. Not yet created one.

What I am not going to do

It is essential 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.

A tick mark here indicates I was successful in controlling myself to stick with the plan. Nothing or did very little as planned.

2021 - What is ahead

Goals

• Continue
• Focus on containers and K8s hands on.
• Pass the AZ-303 certification
• Linux - Become an intermediate level knowledge
• Continue to 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% or more posts to be videos
• 100 subscribers in my coding channel Joymon v/s Code.
• Monthly 1-2 hours to personal projects
• New
• Learn Python language. The goal is to reach an intermediate level
• Build experience in Unified .Net platform.
• Experiments
• The big thing would be an attempt to present a topic in a public event conducted by user groups.
• At least 10% posts to external sites such as CodeProject, DZone CSharpCorner, etc.
• Set up a blockchain and write one smart contract
• Write my own GitHub action.

What I am not going to do

• Blockchain coding - expertise.
• WebAssembly - Maybe watching some videos. Not in deep.
• Go & Scala - Same as web assembly.
• Data science algorithms