Finally, 2024 is over! Another crazy year but I like it! 🤩 This year was a bit chill compared to previous ones, but also I did many new things.
Top 5 highlights in 2024
1. Career
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 main mission was to increase the team size to 4. In 2024, the onboarding was done for all members, and the team became more autonomous and worked at full capacity. I like the process of building and leading the team and am excited for the next steps in 2025. 🤩
2. Dynamic DevOps Roadmap
In 2023, I wrote why the DevOps linear roadmaps are broken by default and then sow the seed of the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap to become a DevOps Engineer.
In 2024, I finished 100% of the roadmap and launched the roadmap website, making reading and following progress much easier. I'm pretty happy that many people like the approach of that roadmap instead of other roadmaps that list tons of DevOps tools! (which doesn't really work!). Here are some other highlights:
- The roadmap repo got more than 1.6k stars on GitHub.
- Added around 250 quiz questions (embedded in each module).
- Added around 200 general interview questions.
- Added interview best practices, which are the same as important as technical skills.
Experience-Driven DevOps: Beyond Tools, Where Concepts Meet Real-World Challenges
A FREE pragmatic DevOps roadmap to kickstart your DevOps career in the Cloud Native era following the Agile MVP style! A DevOps Engineer or Software Engineer, this roadmap is all that you need to start, grow, and expand!
3. Public Speaking
This year, I conducted some nice sessions (in Arabic) with awesome people.
As usual, JobStack_ continues to set the bar higher each year! It is an unmissable event for tech enthusiasts. I really enjoyed participating as both a speaker and a listener. 🤩
In November, I had 2 sessions, the kick-off and another specialized in DevOps.
Also, in December, I participated in a live podcast with Ahmed Elemam covering ⭐ How to start with the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap.
4. Activities
Besides these highlights, I had some nice stuff during the year. For example:
- Updated my main website aabouzaid.com, listed my projects, blog posts, publications, tech talks, and more.
- Traveled to 3 countries, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Dominican Republic to attend tech and work-related events. I also had the chance to meet a lot of friends in those travels. Saudi Arabia wasn't my first time there, but the last time was too long ago, happy to be back again. 🤩
- After 5 years of OnePlus 6, I got a new phone. First, I tried for a couple of months Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, a great device but super heavy! So I swtiched to Samsung Galaxy S24, which is high-quality and perfect in size.
- Since 2020, I've been using the ergonomic mouse (standard vertical) and keyboard (Microsoft Sculpt) and totally like them. Recently, I changed the mouse to Logitech MX Vertical. It's pretty good for me; my only concern is that the clicks are a bit noisy!
- Lost some weight, which is great 😄
And since we are on this topic, here are the top 5 visited blog posts in 2024!
Top 5 posts in 2024
- 2 ways to route Ingress traffic across namespaces - Kubernetes
- How to create Makefile targets with dynamic parameters and autocompletion - Make
- Validate, format, lint, secure, and test Terraform IaC - CI/CD
- Your DevOps learning roadmap is broken! - Career
- 3 ways to customize off-the-shelf Helm charts with Kustomize - Kubernetes
Almost the same as last year, 2023, DevOps, Kubernetes, and Kustomize posts are still in the top.
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, I will focuse on growing the Dynamic DevOps Roadmap community and work on the Career Growth and Advanced Topics section.
Previous Years
Enjoy, and looking forward to 2024! 🤩
