New Year's Resolutions - 2020

Posted on January 1, 2020  •  3 minutes  • 618 words

I did one of these New Year’s posts back in 2017 and 2018 … but for some reason I didn’t get around to doing one in 2019 despite calling it out on New Year’s Eve.

Let’s get this train back on track then and have a look back at the past 12 months and publicly list some goals for the next 12.

Looking Back at 2019

Personally and professionally, 2019 was a huge year that I will never forget.

The year started with the birth of my third child, and it ended with spending time with them offline at the beach (yes, it’s summer at this time of year down in New Zealand.)

It was also the year that I decided I’d been working for my employer at the time for way too long and took the plunge into finding a new job. I ended up moving from an enterprise environment to an MSP (and this change was a lot more of an adjustment than I first expected it to be.)

When I decided to make the move, I wanted to be focusing more on PowerShell during my day job. I set my goal to 50% PowerShell and 50% other Sys Admin / IT tasks. I’ve actually ended up with about 85% of my work being PowerShell focused and I couldn’t be happier.

Finally, 2019 was the year I was granted Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Cloud and Datacenter Management category.

I have looked up to the “PowerShell” MVPs (that’s technically not a thing anymore) for years and I still can’t believe that this award actually has my name on it. Months later, thinking about it still instills a dose of Imposter Syndrome .

When I got the award, I mentioned that it wasn’t an end state for me and that my community contributions would only continue over the coming years. With that in mind, what’s in store for 2020?

Looking Forward to 2020

First and foremost, I’m going to be speaking at a number of PowerShell User Group Meetings this year.

My first talk of the year is “Azure Sentinel for PowerShell Scripters” on January 15 (NZ time) for the Mississippi PowerShell User Group . This talk will be fine tuned and you’ll also be able to catch it at the Research Triangle PowerShell User Group .

If there’s interest I’ll get a calendar up somewhere as more talks get lined up for later in the year.

Locally, the ANZPSUG group is still going strong. We’re holding monthly meetings and are always looking for speakers (hit me up if you’re interested.)

On the blog front, I need to up my cadence and keep a schedule. With that in mind I’ll be aiming for a weekly blog post cadence. You might see some ongoing series arise that end up being (for example) the first post of month. One example of this that I’m really keen on is highlighting my favorite (and must use) PowerShell modules.

You’re likely to see posts come out in the middle of the week, as weekends tend to be fairly slow for traffic and there’s no reason to try and fight that trend!

This year I want to get back into video. This could be shorter and lightly edited videos or livestreams. I’m going to focus on settling into a blog post cadence first to reduce the risk of video creation impacting that… and ending up giving nothing to the community.

Finally, BurntToast needs some love. Releases over the past few years have been… monolithic. I need to get out of that habit, make small changes and get smaller releases out the door.

Credit

Hero image by Jamie Street on Unsplash