2017
This year also introduced some personal challenges and opportunities as well when I moved inside the company from the Ops to the Dev. As a part of that move, I was faced with the challenge of modernizing the tools and practices for our database development towards DevOps world. In a large company like ours, with dozens of development teams, it certainly has been a lot of work. I also needed to familiarize myself with the Scrum framework and even became certified Scrum Product Owner.
As a data platform professional who works mostly with Microsoft products, I have found this year to be exciting. The latest SQL Server release introduced support for Linux platforms and the Docker, alongside multiple new features and improvements to bring more Machine Learning and AI capabilities to our favorite database engine. In the cloud, we now have the Cosmos DB, which is truly impressive and globally distributed database service.
2017 has also been a year of learning. I attended PASS Summit, for more details on that you can find from my earlier blog post. As a Product Owner for our Data Platform implementation I have needed to learn quite a lot about Scrum framework and Product Owner responsibilities in general. Working very closely with the developers has also forced me to re-evaluate some of my earlier beliefs and attitudes, for the better, I hope!
2018
I don’t do new years resolutions, but I do have goals. As a part of the personal learning process, one of my goals for the next year is to brush up my coding skills. I am not looking to change my career that completely, but it makes sense to understand how the applications that use our precious data sources are created. Luckily our company offers us Pluralsight subscriptions and I have already picked myself courses on TypeScript and Angular there. As for the professional goals for the year 2018, driving forward the DevOps agenda in our company is on top of my TODO list. I also need to put more effort into productization of our Data Platform implementation.
I have some goals for the blogging as well. I have seen steady growth of visitors over the years (thank you all, you are the reason I keep writing) and I feel I should produce bit more content throughout the year. To keep this goal, I will be planning most of the content early next year and try to keep with that.
Blog Statistics
I took a quick look at my blog statistics, for the 2017 the Views and Visitors have both gone up roughly 50% from the last year. I think the most surprising thing is that the great majority of my readers come from US. There are 5 times more visitors coming from the US than from the 2nd country in the list, UK. 3rd place goes to India and the 4th to Finland. I was also bit surprised to find out that the most read article was Managing shared folders in Windows Failover Cluster with Powershell. On the other hand it was particularly nasty issue and apparently I was not the only one running into it.
And with that I wish you all happy and prosperous New Year!