Finally, 2023 is over! What a year! One more crazy year, but it was the culmination of many actions I've started previously.
Starting with the fun facts ... this is the post no. 100!
After 9 years of tech blogging in English (I had another 10 in Arabic before that). It should be 108 posts since the plan was to post 1 per month, but I missed some, still not bad!
Top 5 highlights in 2023
1. Career
Image by vectorjuice on Freepik
In 2022, I formed the Distribution team at Camunda which is responsible for building and deploying the Camunda Platform 8 Self-Managed which is an umbrella Helm chart with 10+ systems. In 2023, the biggest challenge was increasing the team headcount to 4 and building the workflow to handle that!
2. Academia
I've always been into data! So in 2020, I started a part-time master's in Data Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University. After almost 3 years, I was awarded a Master of Science with Distinction in Data Engineering 🎉. In June, I got the result after I successfully defended my dissertation titled Modern Data Platform with DataOps, Kubernetes, and Cloud-Native Ecosystem. Then in October, I traveled to Scotland to attend the graduation ceremony. All I can say today is that it was a great experience by all means! (and that's actually why I had some unusual gaps in blog posts in 2023 because I was working on the master's thesis).
3. Mentorship
In the last 5 years, I mentored many people in different career stages (starting their first job, career shift, moving to another work style or company). Almost every day, I see people struggling on their way to the DevOps field. I already wrote why the DevOps linear roadmaps are broken by default! So I decided to fix that and launched a Dynamic DevOps Roadmap to become a DevOps Engineer which under the DevOps Hive identity! The nice thing that I saw many people already like the idea and want to do it that way!
ℹ️ Check out the Dynamic Roadmap content ℹ️
4. Public Speaking
Jobstack is one of my favorite tech events all the time! And as usual, this year was awesome! As a speaker, I had 2 sessions, and as an attendee, I enjoyed many sessions on different topics.
- Platform Engineering: Manage your infrastructure using Kubernetes and Crossplane
- DevOps is not only a culture.
5. Activities
Besides these highlights, I had some nice stuff during the year. For example:
- Developed 2 Kustomize plugins in Golang which are Merger (a schemaless strategic merge plugin) and KubeconformValidator (A plugin built around Kubeconform to validate manifests schema within Kusomize).
- Developed ASDF Plugin Manager, a plugin manager for the asdf version manager!
- Like Kustomize Awesome list, I've created Crossplane Awesome list too!
And since we are on this topic, here are the top 5 visited blog posts in 2023!
Top 5 posts in 2023
- 2 ways to route Ingress traffic across namespaces - Kubernetes
- Validate, format, lint, secure, and test Terraform IaC - CI/CD
- Your DevOps learning roadmap is broken! - Career
- Delete a manifest from Kustomize base - Kubernetes
- 3 ways to customize off-the-shelf Helm charts with Kustomize - Kubernetes
The same as last year, 2022, Kustomize posts are still in the top; that's because there is not much content about it even though it's built-in kubectl now! (since v1.14). That's why I created a Kustomize Awesome list, which is a curated and collaborative list of awesome Kustomize resources.
But this year, 2023, for the first time, a blog post posted in the same year appears in the top 5 posts! Which is discussing how the linear DevOps learning roadmap is broken by default! That's why I had a follow-up post showing the solution that suggests a better way to Become a DevOps Engineer with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap. ⭐
What's next?
As usual, I don't plan the whole year in advance, I just put some high-level directions then work on them as I go in Agile iterative style (yes, I use Agile for personal goals too).
What I know already is that I need to reward myself and take a good break after the master 😁
Also, I want to put more effort to grow the DevOps Hive community to help more people to land their first DevOps Engineer role!
Enjoy, and looking forward to 2024!
