2018 - A year in review

Tuesday, Jan 8, 2019 3 minute read Tags: year-review
Hey, thanks for the interest in this post, but just letting you know that it is over 3 years old, so the content in here may not be accurate.

With another year done it time to get going on my year in review post. This year I’ve actually managed to get it done a full 3 days earlier than 2017’s!

2018 was a pretty quiet year for me on the blogging front, with only 11 posts (including a ‘year in review’ one), and most of them were meta-posts about blogging or how I run websites. This reflects in my traffic stats, there was a drop in traffic over 2018 vs 2017. But this year was less about blogging and instead it was quite a big year for me both personally and professionally.

Getting Personal

I’ll start with the personal side of what made 2018 big, and that was that my wife and I welcomed our 2nd child in March. Unfortunately it wasn’t as smooth sailing as we had hoped, with him spending the first 8 days of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at our hospital. He was born just a touch earlier than planned and he had some trouble breathing which resulted in his stay in NICU.

While he was only in there for a short period of time, relative to what most people there experience, it’s really tough to bring your wife home but not your newborn too. But we were lucky that he recovered quickly and now, 10 months on, you wouldn’t have any idea that he’d had any issues.

Ultimately being a dad of 2 had meant that I had a lot less free time to dedicate to all my other ventures and thus the blogging took a bit of a hit.

Being Professional

Throughout 2018 I continued with my secondment to the Readify sales team. Being ‘off the tools’ did mean that I was having to invest a bit more time out of hours to stay up to date, or take more targeted PD when I wanted to learn something.

I used this as a chance to really brush up on Azure, got myself a MCSA so apparently I know all about the Azure!

Speaking

While I might have been keeping things a bit low-key on the blogging front I had a fairly hectic year speaking, over the course of 2018 I spoke at:

  • uduf
  • NDC Security
  • NDC Oslo
  • DDD Perth
  • DDD Sydney (well, I MC’ed it 😛)
  • DDD Melbourne
  • NDC Sydney (workshop + talk)
  • ALT.NET Sydney

I’m pretty stoked at how many events I got to speak at this past year and I’m starting to prepare for the events I want to get to this year. Hopefully I can get a few more in 2019 😉.

Ending an Era

And this brings us to the big event of 2018, I left Readify to join Microsoft. I’ll do a separate post about that shortly but in summary it was a hard decision to make, Readify’s been my home for over 8 years, double my next longest stint anywhere, but my role at Microsoft was an opportunity I just couldn’t pass up.

So on to 2019, a new job at a new company and hopefully an exciting year to come!