published: 24th of December 2023
As 2023 comes to a close, it's time to look back and see how I went in accomplishing my goals for the year.
Sadly, family events took a bit of hit this year. We did managed to do some nice things together. They were all local things, like going ice skating, swimming at the local pool, and going to the movies. We played a lot of computer/switch/xbox games together which is always fun. We have started doing friday night game night, where we play an Xbox game we can all play together. It's pretty rad to have 5 players in a game at once on the big screen.
My boys played both Soccer and AFL at school, as well as did swimming lessons all year. My youngest was not a great swimmer, he missed out on alot of practice when we was younger due to covid. He has improved out of sight this year and he can now swim well enough to be safe and I am much more comfortable with him being in the water. My eldest boy did really well at swimming. He started in a swim class that focuses on arm strokes, and he made it up 4 levels to the top level of squad training (juniors).
My daughter has been working this year which is fantastic and we went to lunch a few times although I don't recall excactly the frequency. She spent alot more time at my house this year which has been great and I didn't feel like I missed out on seeing her as much as I did in the last few years.
Renovating the house took up most of my free time this year. It was a mammoth task, but I am really happy with the results. We got a new patio giving us a nice outdoor area to relax in. We had a new driveway installed last year, and this year we had it painted which improved the look of it alot. We had solar installed which is really helping to keep the power bills down. I took 2 week of leave to renovate the kitchen, dinning, lounge rooms and replace the flooring throughout the rest of the house (excluding bedrooms). We painted the walls in the renovated areas. Replaced the back and front doors, built a new side gate, plus lots of other little things. It felt like almost every weekend I was doing something around the house. I managed to get all the planned renovations done except painting the inside roof.
Over the last coule of years I have been working towards a career change to a cloud focused role. I felt like my carrer was stagnating in networking and I was not excited about any of the new technologies coming out.
In March I started a new job as a cloud architect at a mining company. Since then, I have been drinking from the firehose, learning the ins-and-outs of Azure and AWS, but mostly Azure. I am really excited about technology again and I am enjoying the new challenges. I am working with a great team of people and I am learning alot from them. The role is focused around multi-cloud / hybrid on-prem networking. So I am working with technologies around that space. I am also doing alot of automation work which is great.
I did not spend as much time as I would have liked writing Rust code this year due to the time sink of renovating the house. I did get a couple of cool things done. I expolored writing a game in the Bevy engine. That was a lot of fun and my kids helped me with ideas and we played the game alot together.
I also started writing a CLI tool to help wtih troubleshooting network connectivity called NetKraken. I have been using it in my $JOB to help reduce mean time to innocence and I will be adding more features to it in the future.
I also wrote a web service for $JOB using the Axum framework. I really like it, and will be using it for future projects.
I managed to fail the AWS network specialty exam. I was planning to do it again, but I am working more with Azure at the moment and needed to concentrate my efforts there. I have booked another attempt in January 2024.
I did complete a couple of Aviatrix certifications which relate to the new Job I started in March. I passed the ACE associate and ACE operations specialty certs. I work with Aviatrix a fair bit in my $JOB so I may do more of their certs in the future.
My health and fitness took a bit of a dive this year. Mostly because I spent all my free time doing renovations around the house. I also managed to stuff up my knee pretty good and I need surgery to fix it.
I read/listened to 35 books this year. Towards the end of the year I purchased a Kindle Scribe. I really like the bigger form factor, it's easier to hold and read. I have not used the scribe feature much yet, but from a couple of tests, it is REALLY good. It feels like writing on paper and it works perfectly.
All in all, a pretty good year. Some things had to be sacrificed to get the house renovations done but that's life. I am looking forward to 2024, lets see what the year brings.