published: 1st of January 2022
2021, another year, another year of the pandemic. I had lots of plans for 2021 and life decided to get in the way of most of them.
At the start of the year I set my yearly goals outlined in this post. Someone really close to me was diagnosed with Cancer in January and helping them through that consumed most of my bandwidth for any extra-carricular activities.
Seriously, cancer sucks ass. My near and dear has thankfully come out the other side after surgery, chemo and radiation treatment and is on the long road back to health.
My health and fitness took a bit of a hit in 2021.
The half iron-man was cancelled due to Covid. I managed to ride my bike, alot less than I wanted to. I came nowhere near my strength building goals. On top of that, I put on about 10kgs! FARK!!!!
I did start an atomic workout routine in December which I will outline more in me 2022 goals post comming up shortly.
Worklife got in the way of family life a bit this year. I started a new job in January, which seemed to consume alot of family time. Between learning new technologies and after hours work, it was really draining for all by the end of the year.
On the certification front, I did not acheive any of my goals, work was just too busy and there was too much more important stuff to attend to. The only cert I managed to complete was the Citrix SD-WAN cert. Something, I hope I never have to use in my life.
I read or listended to 25 books this year, about a book every 2 weeks on average.
Nothing came of the network automation project I was working on. Sadly, after January, time for side projects was in short supply.
Am I a man yet? Check here to find out. Spoiler alert. NOOP!
I ended up having a bit of a worldwind tour of programming languages this year. I started out by dabbling in Elixir, Spend a fair amount of time in the first half of the year learning Go. Spent a few months learning Crystal and in the last 2 weeks of 2021, started learning Rust.
Crystal, is an awesome language, if it had a better Windows story I would do all my dev in Crystal.
I must say, I am really enjoying Rust so far, over the next couple of months, I will find out if I will stick with it.
I stared a new job in November. It's more of a security focused role with a smattering of automation.
After about ~15 years in networking I am pivoting away from network focused roles. I like networking, I just don't love it anymore. I find the newer technologies pretty boring. I have also grown really frustrated at how slow the vendors are moving on the automation front. It's getting better, maybe in another 10 years it will have improved enough for me to be interested again.
I have also grown tired of the long afterhours and weekend work that is required for the role. I lost way to much time with my family this year and my health was affected by the odd hours. I'm done with oddball hours. If I ever take a networking role again, I will be doing all my changes in the middle of the day.
I have decided to move more into the security/cloud space with a focus on automation/design and will be focusing my efforts in those areas in future.
2021 seemed to fly-by there was so much going on in my life. It kind of feels like I was just surviving at times and not alot of living happened. Let's hope for a better year in 2022. Stay safe all!