Looking Back, Looking Forward

I (re)started this tech blog two years ago, and I'm rather enjoying this incarnation of the blog. It's a lot more technical, and a lot less snarky. My old tech blog, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology was fun, and it was fun at times to snark on the vagaries of nonprofit technology, but I'm kinda over all of that (although I still sometimes snark on Twitter.) It's been really great to just do technical deep-dives.

So here is my 2019 year in review, and what I'm looking forward to in 2020.

Looking at this blog, the most popular posts of the year were:

Skills I really enjoyed learning last year:

  • Getting really facile with a lot of AWS resources, and getting more of them under my belt.
  • Getting fluent in Docker
  • Continuing to hone my Python skills
  • Beginning to Learn Vagrant
  • Beginning to learn Ansible
  • Diving deep into Tor
  • Upgrading my baby Javascript to toddler

Skills I'm looking forward to in the next year:

  • Doing more with Tor server-side
  • Honing my Vagrant and Ansible skills
  • Continuing to learn more AWS
  • Learning Rust and/or Go (I don't have a good reason for this, but...)
  • Grappling with front-end Pelican (gah, I suck at the front-end)
  • Learning Vue (again, gah)

Open Source Projects

I contributed more to more open source projects last year than I have in a long while (possibly more than ever). Part of this is because I'm using more of them than I ever have, part of it is I'm feeling a lot more confident in my abilities to contribute. I'm looking foreward to even more of that. I put my first project up on Pypi earlier this month. (I talked about it in a previous blog post, it's called Simple-AWS.)

Upcoming Projects

My project list for the next few months:

  • Continue to develop Simple-AWS
  • Work on a highly personalized version of this PyPortal code (PyPortal is this great little device.)
  • Work on a Rasbperry Pi Camera to watch our dog
  • Work on a project tracking app in Django (because, I have projects! And I want to get better at Django.)

Blogging I hope to do here in the next month:

  • Encryption & DNS
  • More on Tor
  • A post on Docker vs. Vagrant vs. Kubernetes

It's been a great year technically, and I'm looking forward to 2020!

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