Review of 2018 / Looking forward to 2019

Wow – looking back over my posts, my last review of the year was in 2013. Interestingly it feels like I’ve just had a very similar year and I’m feeling excited about 2019, the same way that I was for 2014!

During the course of 2018, I’ve had 4 roles in 3 different companies – no wonder it feels like a long year!!! Over the past 5 years, the role I started back in 2013 had grown and changed beyond recognition through several acquisitions. Whilst I’d been looking around for a while, a role change at the beginning of the year highlighted that it was time to move on. Unbeknown to me, the company joined over the summer was undergoing some quite large organisational changes itself whilst I was working out my notice. As a result of those changes, I joined a role that really didn’t bear much resemblance to what I was expecting. As luck would have it, catching up with a former manager resulted in my current role, which I’m now 2 months into.

I’ve joined a European travel insurance company as their tech lead, to help them position the technical team and platform to take on the challenges as the company enters the next phase of its life. Over the course of 2019, I’ll hopefully be looking at a lot more Azure (basically everything across that platform) and .NET Core – possibly with a bit of Vue thrown in for good measure. If the year pans out as I hope, I’ll be getting my hands dirty with production code a lot more again.

Whilst I haven’t blogged anywhere as much as I had hoped, I’ve stayed pretty active in the developer community. At the start of the year, I helped out at Codebar Brighton and did a day’s codeathon for the Humanitarian Toolbox. I’ve also attended various monthly sessions at Worthing Digital, Brighton Alt.Net and Mobile Meetup. I was also lucky enough to again attend the free DDD Reading conference.

I also got my SAFe practitioner accreditation, which was really interesting and useful to see how it can help a company that needs to manage a large number of developers in an enterprise environment. From my brief experience of the process, whilst I can see how it can help in certain situations, I have to say that I won’t be too disappointed if I don’t get to use it again.

So what do I hope 2019 will bring?

• Azure: I hope that I’ll finally get some production code into Azure and gain a lot more exposure to the platform. I am interested in looking into Azure Architecture accreditation, so watch this space.
• Vue: I quite like React, but I think Vue is better placed in my current role. Learning both have just confirmed that I’m never going to be Angular’s biggest fan!
• HTML/CSS: I’ve not had many calls in recent years to keep my HTML/CSS skills at a level that is needed for public-facing websites, looking forward to changing this.
• Blogging: I’m hoping that doing more coding will help get me back into blogging again. Pageviews for my blog are hovering around 1-2k per month, it would be good to get that up to 10k by the end of 2019.
• Mobile: I don’t think there will be many calls for this in my current role but would like to keep my hand in on both Android and iOS development, maybe this will be the year I get at least one of projects I have on the go into the App Store.

So roll on 2019, it will be interesting to see what the year review will be like?