2013 certainly didn’t turn out as planned, the less said about the first half of the year the better; so moving on (which I did!) In the second half of the year I joined a company which has managed to get me excited about and enjoying programming again! It has been an insanely busy 7 months into which (as well as the normal .NET stuff) we’ve managed to cram learning to program iOS and Android (the latter being more of a challenge for 2014. There was also a lot of groundwork investing in new processes and systems and preparing us and the business for the coming challenges in the next couple of years. There’s also been the odd bit of specification work! I managed to get along to a few Brighton ALT.NET sessions (something I’d not managed or felt like for a while) and enjoyed going to Worthing Digital evenings throughout the year.
I’m looking forward to 2014, I finished 2012 trying to be optimistic about 2013 – I’m finishing 2013 feeling and believing that there is the load to be optimistic about in 2014!
I’ve been hosting my blog on Blogger for the past 10 years. For the past couple of years, I’ve been looking at rebooting my blog, trying to decide whether to stick with Blogger, write my own blog platform (like all developers at some point) or move onto WordPress. I’ve never needed to set up a WordPress site previously, so this seemed to be the perfect chance to learn something new! So, my new blog will . . .
I’ve picked up my own .dev domain and have set up a very basic website at paulhadfield.dev. The site is hosted in Azure and I’ve set up continuous integration/deployment up in DevOps pipelines. As well as scratching that itch of creating my own website, something I’ve been talking about for a while, it will allow me to learn more about various Azure technologies. This is part of my plan to look into becoming a certified . . .