This month Mala has asked us to post about our Learning Goals for 2018. Now, there’s nothing like nailing your colours to the mast so you can come back in a year and see if you actually did something (though let’s not talk about my 2017 exercise plans!), so here goes:
Tech Learning Goals
Networking
I read TCP Illustrated years ago, so apart from IPv6 I’m pretty solid on the fundamentals. but the increasing number of ways these can be manipulated and managed has ballooned. And no matter where your data and applications are going to live in the future it’s still going to be essential to know how they can be connected. So I’m definitely pencilling in some time with our Network Infrastructure team to get an overview of what’s out there, and what they see as the future. I know I can bingle that sort of stuff, but it’s even better to get some professional advice
Then I’ll be hitting Pluralsight and other video and looking forward to building some very different labs to the ones I’m used to. For once the servers and the data won’t be the focus.
The aim is to sit in a meeting with our network team and keep up with everything! Though I might draw the line at memorising the Cisco model numbers like the seem to have
More Automation
I’ve increasingly automated a lot of my repetitive work tasks. But I need to automate a lot of the routine work that’s come in a filled up my ‘spare’ time. Now I’m as guilty as the next IT Pro about sticking to the easy fix for automation and sticking to technologies I know. Well, for 2018 I’m going to start branching out and make the automation to force me to learn some new technologies. So rather than sticking to PowerShell I’ll be looking at Python and Go in more depth, looking at more serverless Cloud technologies for data transformation and endpoints rather than spinning up more VMs or containers and trying to let other Cloud services take the strain rather than me.
If I get this right and make progress, then the other things on this list will come to pass. Freeing up time to work on the good stuff will be the biggest pay off.
New Personal skill
Improve my Writing
I’m not a natural writer by any stretch of the imagination, my natural inclination is numbers, equations and strange pencil diagrams that only I can decode. This tends to limit me when writing documentation, and blog posts take a disproportionate amount of time to write.
So I’m going to head to the Nottingham library to get some books on writing. And to make sure I put it into practice, I’m going to be keeping a journal from January 1st (don’t worry, it won’t be online!). Hopefully forcing myself to write everyday without an audience will help me with writing for an audience. So I’ve 2 weeks to find a nice pen and notebook to try and inspire my inner Samuel Pepys!
New non tech skill
Get better at marketing myself
In the classic British manner I’m happy to hid my lamp under a bushel. So for next year I’m going to try to put myself out there. I’m hoping this will be help along with some from improving my writing as above. I’m going to make more use of asking other tech friends to review session submissions with useful feedback. Asking for feedback from organisers on my submissions, including when I succeed so I can build on good things as well as fixing the bad.
And hoping that the increased blog posting from my better writing skills means I’ll have more content to share here, and from the new tech skills more interesting things to write about.
The metrics for this one will be the number of events I present at in 2018, the number of visitors to my blog.
Conclusions
To me that looks like a good solid set of skills to work on. They complement each other, so an improvement in one should help with another one. They can also be worked on at different rates, which stops things getting stressful if something has to be put aside due to other pressures.
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