2022 Review

Been a short while since my last blog post so thought it would be a good start to the year to do a quick review of 2022.

This will only really cover back to September of last year when I joined Azenix as a Senior DevEx Engineer.

Azenix

I joined Azenix last year needing a change from my previous role. I was looking to work with a company that would allow me to experience a wide range of technologies and projects.

Having not had any prior experience with consulting I was a bit nervous at the start but have since thrown myself into every opportunity that has come my way.

I have started this blog as a part of this, wanting to share my experiences and learnings with others. I have also been working with many different clients and seen uses of cloud technologies ranging from very basic networking layouts to high-scale critical applications.

I also gave my first talk in November at DDD Melbourne By Night. I spoke about using Docker and Docker-Compose to create a consistent development experience across multiple operating systems. I really enjoyed this opportunity and am looking to do more of this in the future.

Technology

Over the last 5 months, I have been able to use a lot of different technologies and see how they are being used in the real world. The following are my thoughts on some of them as well as some new ones that I have been looking into.

Containers are still a big thing, many clients are using containizered applications and Kubernetes to achieve high availability and scalability.

Azure Container Apps is a new service that I can see being used to increase the ability of teams to create containerized applications and microservice-based systems without needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Terraform continues to be the tool of choice for Infrastructure as Code, nearly all the clients that I have been involved with have either been using or are starting to use it to manage their infrastructure.

An interesting use case for Terraform that I have observed was to use it to manage and maintain GitHub repositories, this is something that I think could see further adoption in the future.

On that note, GitHub has been a big part of my work over the last 5 months. With many clients already on GitHub or actively moving to it.

There is a variety of reasons that I can see for this, from using GitHub Actions to automate their CI/CD pipelines to using the GitHub Advanced Security features to monitor their repositories for vulnerabilities. Lastly, there is one technology that I have been very interested in and in my personal opinion is going to provide a lot of value to developers in the future. That is Microsoft Dev Box.

I will go into more detail about Dev Box in a follow-up blog post but the short version is that it provides a virtualized development environment that can be accessed from any device. It provides this on-demand through either a web browser or a Remote Desktop client.

I have used it myself for doing demos and even worked from it for a week and was very impressed with how easy it was to get going as well as the performance of the remote session.

Goals for 2023

Now looking forward to 2023, I have a few goals that I would like to work towards.

The first is to continue to share my experiences and learnings with others. I have already started this with this blog and am looking to do more of this in the future.

Next, I would like to build on my public speaking skills, giving more talks at local meetups as well as applying to speak at conferences.

And finally, I think this year I will start to look at certifications, this is something that I have put off in the past due to needing to focus on the work at hand and not having the time to study. I feel that in my current role, I am supported to do this and will be starting to plan out a pathway of what certifications I would like to achieve.

I hope everyone reading has a great 2023 and I look forward to sharing more of my experiences and learnings with you all.