2023 Review

It has been a while since my last blog post and I am a bit late to the party with this one but I thought it would be a good start to the year to do a quick review of 2023.

Last year was a pretty big one for me, I started the year giving my first Conference talk at DevOpsDays Melbourne YouTube Link

From there I also started being more involved in some community user groups, specifically DDD Melbourne By Night and the Melbourne Azure Nights.

I have also been streaming intermittently on Twitch, this has been a great place to practice my presenting skills as well as live coding which I have enjoyed. I have been doing 3-hour sessions on Tuesday nights but this schedule has been hard to keep at times.

On the work front, I have been pretty busy working across a good diversity of projects, from platform engineering to data platforms.

Along the way I also got promoted to Lead Engineer, this has opened new opportunities for me not only to grow my technical skills but also my leadership skills. I have also been able to mentor some of the other engineers in the team which has been a great experience.

Technology

With a lot of my time working on pipelines and infrastructure as code in my day-to-day work, I have been getting some good experience with Azure Bicep. I have found this to be in my opinion better than Terraform as I pretty much focus on working in Azure right now. I think the simplicity of not needing to be concerned with managing a state file has made things easier.

I also had my first experience with Azure Synapse (which I previously posted a blog on). This was an interesting bit of work and I look forward to working on some more data platforms in the future such as Azure Fabric.

Outside of the day-to-day I have also been doing a lot of work on presenting GitHub Copilot, this is a tool that I am pretty passionate about and think will be a game changer for not only developers but also DevOps and Data engineers.

Lastly, I have been spending time working on some personal side projects with Large Language Models (LLMs) and running them locally, I will be posting more about this in the future.

2024 Goals

So with 2023 coming to a close, I had some time off and then moved house, so this is why the blog post is a bit late. I have been thinking about what I want to achieve in 2024 and I have come up with the following goals:

• Present at more conferences and user groups
• Change up my streaming to be shorter streams more focused on side projects and new technology
• Have a look at creating some YouTube content around DevOps and Platform Engineering
• Continue to grow both my technical and leadership skills

Along with this I am also looking into the Microsoft MVP program, I think this would be a great opportunity to be more involved in the community and also get some more exposure to new technology.