2016: Year In Review
2016 Year In Review
Not something that I have done in the past, but I think it is something that I should start doing. It is also great to reflect back on the year and really see your journey.
Personal
Going to kick this off with what has happened personally. I have really stepped up in my OSS participation and have made several contributions to Cake. I have also been able to author my own projects, most being addins for Cake. I have had several opportunities present themselves this year and those opportunities are not yet fully realized.
Participation in user groups has increased and I am finally finding the user groups that I am eager to always attend. I have also had the privilege again to present at CodeStock 2016 and I look forward to the opportunity to make it three consecutive years.
Finally, I have a few other outreach related items that I spent some time planning in Late 2016 and I hope I am able to materialize some of those.
Professional
Going to start with the fact that I have been blessed with an awesome team. Everyone on my team brings a desire to do their best and constantly out performs themselves. Below is just an example of how this team is rocking it every year.
Software Releases
| Year | Releases | New Apps Created |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | ~10 | 0 |
| 2015 | ~50 | 1 |
| 2016 | ~300 | 7 |
Now this is a huge accomplishment and the kicker is that this is just a team of 5 developers. Which leads to the next big item for me, DevOps.
I have finally got to execute and leverage the tooling around devops. The team has been able to do this due to tools like TeamCity, Jenkins, Cake, and of course Azure. Without any of these, we would not have been able to move so quickly. Our system stability has increased, we haven’t had any major downtime as compared to 2014 and 2015. We have also been able to deliver more business value which is always a big win.
Lastly, 2016 another big year, as I am shifting roles again, into a Solutions Architect position. In this position I will get to leverage a skill that I really enjoy. We have a ton of technical debt in this area, systems to tightly integrated, stability issues, etc. In this new role, I can take the principles from my team and start to apply those to other systems across the organization.
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