wrap up 2016
So here I am again - drafting a post on my phone. In fact I’ve done this a number of times in the last couple of years. With wordpress it’s even perfectly possible to post right away - the mobile app is great. But since I wanted to be geeky and build this blog on Hugo and host on github pages - I’ll have to take the extra step. That’s exactly what I was talking about at DevOps Days TLV - creativity and geekiness usually don’t go hand in hand with efficiency. At least not at first. Cutting new paths is always harder and takes longer than walking the beaten ones.
I was planning to write a personal wrap-up for 2016 and do some general theme-setting for 2017. But this december was hectic. It’s already the 30th and I have to use the few spare minutes with the phone while Janka is in the fitting room.
Yes, we found a great dress!!!
And now I’m home and went into my “writing room”.
So what exactly happened in 2016?
Personally - this was a big year: I’ve finally realized my almost 5 years old dream and became a freelancer. And then started building a company. It was a challenging decision. Simply said I was scared, not sure of myself. But I succeeded in gradually building my confidence. And I have to thank my friends and my family who empowered and advised me on this road. There’s still a long journey ahead, I’m still not sure how things will work out. Right now it’s sometimes even hard to call Otomato a company. It’s mostly me and a few think-alike creative folks who hop on and off. But I’m intent on building this into a real brand. Something bigger than myself, something with a life of its own. Because this is the ultimate goal of any creative activity - to give life to something meaningful, valuable, beautiful.
This year I was lucky enough to speak at a number of tech conferences in Israel and abroad. We’ve finished the third DevOps certification course at I.T.College and started the fourth one. I personally worked on a number of exciting projects spanning a wide range of subjects such as: security, IOT, sharing economy, forex, advertisement and telco. And most importantly - I’ve met and worked with a lot of great people. I had a chance to learn from them and teach them. I had a chance to share.
It wasn’t all easy and beautiful. Some of it was nerve-wrecking and exhausting. I wasn’t always sure where I’m going or if the choices are right. And some of them were wrong. But overall - I’m sincerely grateful for the year behind and the lessons it taught me.
Now what do I expect of year 2017?
On the personal level - I will definitely focus more on listening. To others and to myself. Especially to my closest ones. Janka needs me more than usual these days, and I was a bit too engaged in building the business lately.This is a good opportunity to remind myself about balance.
Talking about balance: December was hectic and I’ve relaxed my gym schedule far beyond acceptable. I’ll start the year by getting back on track. The physical activity has tangible positive impact on my emotional and intellectual well-being.
And I’ll do more singing and playing. Especially now that I can join forces with Eran (my son). He’s become a good drummer and is also moving ahead in his bass playing.
Now to professional. After all this blog is more about that - my contribution to the outside world.
I already tweeted about setting chatbots and storytelling as two important themes. I got very excited about ChatOps and the whole idea of collaborative cli about 4-5 months ago. But I still haven’t found the time to look into it in more depth or build a real ChatOps solution. So in year 2017 I will be focusing on this from the very start. Especially as I have some customers sharing my excitement.
Storytelling has become a major theme with me in the last couple of months. Clearly thanks to Y.N.Harari’s [Sapiens] (http://www.ynharari.com/sapiens/short-overview/) and the Tedx TLV Storytelling workshop we attended. I’ve always loved telling and hearing good stories. And now I actually see that every little thing around me is a story. And I want it all to be stories worth telling.
And I also believe I should focus even more on education. There’s so much that can still be improved in how we teach and how we learn. And I sincerely believe we can build a new kind of technical training - something that will be a better fit for the future world of AI, IoT and global organizations.
Those are my themes. And what are yours?
