Yes, this is sort of a post about what I’m planning to do in 2022 and what I did in the past year, but slightly different from previous posts like this that I’ve done in the past.
I’m not a fan of the resolutions idea, but as I type this it’s a rainy day on an otherwise nice holiday where I’ve had the chance to relax and think about what I want in the future. Which very much includes this site and everything around it, so I figured I might as well write it all out.
The dark past
For most people on this planet the past two years have been a bit of a rollercoaster, and as the lack of posts on this site shows I obviously wasn’t an exception to that. There are a number of reasons for that; the two most important being that I have the honour of living in the city that holds the world record for most days of lockdown, and even more important that about a year ago my wife gave birth to a tiny human who has since then decided to take up most of my spare time.
These two events mean that whenever I felt like I should write something I was either not in the mood (mostly in 2020) or way too tired and just wanted to rest (mostly in 2021). And in order to keep my sanity in check, that meant I eventually relegated writing on my blog to a very low priority. There have been a couple of times I wrote, and I have even more half-finished posts1 or ideas that I haven’t gotten around to. In a similar move, I also dropped off social media because there was too much negativity there.
Weirdly enough, I actually still did quite a bit. Enough that I was named the #1 AWS Ambassador for ANZ in 20212. I did a bunch of podcasts for the meetup that I organise, as well as my aborted attempt at AWS related bedtime stories. I published a tool for easier CloudFormation deployments and gave a bunch of talks.
In the background I’m also one of the organisers for DevOpsDays Melbourne, which was originally scheduled for 2020, then 2021, and now hopefully will take place in March 2022. Obvious plug here, follow that link if you’re interested in speaking at this in-person event or want to buy a ticket. We’re planning to have a wonderful time and I’m really excited both for my first time organising a conference as well as the first time since re:Invent 2019 of actually attending one in person3.
Back to the site, in the past I’ve posted stats here about my traffic. Turns out that when you don’t update a site much, traffic stops being sent there. So let’s just say that I didn’t get a lot of visitors and should be happy I don’t actually make any money with this site4.
As for the future
Now, I’m not going to set goals here. The main reason is that I don’t want to feel guilty if stuff happens that stops me from writing. However, I do want to do certain things that have dropped off the site during the past year.
First, I want to make sure that I post everything I do to the site. That means I’ll post links to my podcast recordings (with the ability to play them directly from here) soon after they go up, but also that I’ll mention when I’ll be speaking at a meetup or other event and that I’ll post a link to a recording soon after. I intend to go back and post some of the ones I missed in the past year as well. I’ll try to find a way to highlight these sort of items so you can filter them out from your RSS reader or email client if you so desire5.
My weekly updates will return! Kinda obvious with this being one even when it’s posted on a different day than usual. Hopefully I’ll be writing one every week, but again I’m not going to promise that. They always worked as a nice way for me to keep up to date on things, and I’ve missed that. Let’s see how that will go this year.
I also intend to write about the various things I’ve done. Fog in itself is fodder for a series of blogposts, but I’ll want to write about some non-AWS related topics as well. I’ve been having fun with my mechanical keyboards6 and automation on iOS.
One thing I probably won’t do is write about things that annoy me. I’m happy to be critical and put digs into an otherwise positive story, but whenever I started writing posts that are mostly about how terrible something is I ended up walking away and not want to write for weeks. Let’s see if I’ll be more amenable to things like that next year. There’s also a chance that I’ll include more little jokes in my writing. I need to practice those dad jokes somewhere…
There are some other things I’m considering as part of my thinking about the future that may have an impact on this site, but if they come to fruition you’ll hear about it then.
TL;DR
Who puts a TL;DR at the end? This guy! If you don’t like it, well, what can I say except “You’re welcome”?
Anyway, to summarise it all, I’m planning to be more active on this site both with things that I’ve done and will be doing. Mostly I want to go back to this being a fun diversion from stuff that’s going on elsewhere that also helps keep my mind sharp.
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It’s amazing how often I started writing about Graviton 2, but ended up with something I didn’t feel was worth publishing. Also, it turns out that I really didn’t want to write about issues I had with services (*cough*SSO*cough*). ↩︎
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Although to be honest, while I know that quantity is an easy metric for this, I don’t believe that my contributions had as much of an impact as those of some of my fellow ambassadors. But as that is the measurement being used, I’ll happily play along. ↩︎
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Feel free to cross fingers, knock on wood, or whatever superstitious thing you might believe in that will help with the event actually happening. ↩︎
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As in, intentionally don’t want to make money with it. On second reading I realised that could be misinterpreted as the lack of traffic costing me income. ↩︎
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I briefly considered setting up a separate feed for people who don’t want those kind of posts, but that’s just adding too much complexity as I’d need to think for everything where it belongs. ↩︎
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I bought a Keyboardio Atreus recently to use as my commute keyboard and have been trying to figure out how to make 44 keys work for everything I want it to do. ↩︎