2023 is ending and its common to have moments of introspection about the year. For me this implies quite a few things: a retrospective of my professional life, one about my personal goals, another analyzing the level of compliance with the habits that I have wanted to set and even a letter that I write to myself from year to year (if we are talking about accountability, we owe such a level to few people other than ourselves). Far from being a tedious process, I confess that I like it. It is an opportunity to stop, think and check if the path I´m walking goes towards where I want to go. Come to think of it, there is a clear parallelism with my habit of regularly checking the route on a map on my hiking trips. All this makes me realize two things: clearly Im kind of a geek and of course I am a very data driven person, at this point I don’t know if it is product of déformation professionnelle or a builtin setup.

This year I have to add a new audit to the list.

Recap about the blog

As an idea, the blog was born a couple of years ago. But it was in my previous recap (2022) where I set the goal of starting it formally, along with a metric to reach. The thing about being a data driven geek is that it prevents my recaps from being based on subjective opinions (I think it wasn´t that bad, I think I fell short of…) and instead rely on objective data and be more honest. So now its time to see, among other things, what this first year of blogging was like. First lest review the set objective and its metric:

Publish the blog, have 12 posts in the first year

First part, way accomplished. Second part, there´s 9 out of the set 12 posts. 75%. Not great, not terrible. Besides the number of posts, in which I did fell short, there have been some usability improvements and ―almost as important― the addition to the backlog of a few more that will come out in 2024. On the other hand, if I track the only metric I can monitor natively in the Azure static webapp that hosts the blog (requests to the server, not too reliable) I see a small upward trend.

I also take a few lessons learned, the thing about writing a blog is that is as continuous a learning process as the rest of my work. Its not only important to have good information to share, but to share it in a comfortable or, better said, usable way.

Even having missed the goal by 25%, I´m reaching the end of 2023 and feel satisfied because it has been a great year of professional growth: I´ve finally challenged myself to publish the blog and share a little of my professional day to day with the world, well, more like the part of the world that reaches the blog and wants to read it. It has been a year in which I have opened myself to scrutiny and the opinions/criticism of my peers. A year where there has been an even greater growth with my advancement from SRE to TechLead that will also be reflected in the blog itself.

So okay, I missed the mark of the 12 post in the first year. But I can say that I´ve dared with this project and giving back a bit of all the knowledge and experiences that the Net has given me. And since I´m a geek, I can´t help but have this quote come to mind: “And where does this newborn go from here? The Net is vast and infinite”