As seems to be common this time of year, I wanted to take a moment at the end of year to put down some goals for moving forward. Goals and professional development have been a popular topic this year, with Melissa Palmer’s contribution to the IT Architect book series, IT Architect Series: The Journey and VMunderground’s Opening Acts panel, How Failing Made Me Better both generating discussion at VMworld and online. Additionally, there has been the ever-present progression of job changes and certification achievements happening every year.
On a personal level this year also marked several milestones, including:
- completion of a long-standing certification goal, completing the VCAP6-DTM Deploy certification and thus the VCIX6-DTM requirements
- after a year of holding the domain name and paying for hosting, this blog finally got off the ground, with a set of posts for 2017 including technical content and conference reporting
- realizing a long-standing goal and attending VMworld for the first time
Additionally I’ve had conversations with multiple members of the vCommunity that have pushed me to move a bit quicker on some efforts. While not all of those have had the desired outcome, it has all been for the better, and sped up my progress on my development.
So in the spirit of all that I’m willing to publicly state the below goals for 2018. This is offered as where I think I’m headed, but of course may change:
- Blogging:
- Since starting in the middle of year I’ve reached 12 posts this year. I’m very happy with the topic breakdown and the number of posts written and plan to complete at least 20 posts in 2018.
- I would, however, like to do better at posting more regularly, thus I’m setting a goal of posting once a month.
- Finally, while I wasn’t successful this year, I’m pledging now, assuming there is a Blogtober undertaking in the vCommunity, I’m in.
- Certification:
- As noted previously, I completed my last major, standing certification goal earlier this year. At the moment, my focus is on maintaining what I have, which translates to completing at least one of the VCAP7-DTM exams/certifications.
- Windows 10:
- Obviously, as the end of life for Windows 7 moves closer, developing a richer skill set around deploying and maintaining Windows 10 in a VDI environment is important.
- CloudCred:
- While I’be had an account on CloudCred since early 2015, I really haven’t been active there until the last few months of this year. I’m planning to complete a minimum of 15,000 points in 2018.
- Coding Practice
- With the increasing focus on code as <term> and automation, it seems like a good time to spend some time refreshing my programming skills. My goal around this is to write something that I’m happy enough with to publish publicly.
So there we go, there’s my goals for 2018, let’s all see how things go.
