2021 and 2022

As we all are ready to say goodbye to year 2021 and welcome 2022, let me pen down few of my personal updates here. They may sound boring and maybe a little beneficial for many like me who are always looking to better themselves from yesterday. This post is more about my goals in 2021 , how much of it was I able to achieve and what plans I have for 2022, more like a boring retrospective of my life in 2021.

I try to divide my goals or plans in two categories: short-term and long-term. Long term involve working on goals which have bigger outcome like learning DevSecOps, Web development, Cloud technologies etc. And short-term goals involve learning some tools or programming languages which will help me in achieving my long term goals. At the beginning of 2021 I was very much determined to contribute in OpenSource projects in my spare or research time which is, a long term goal. The reason I’m calling it research time is the only time apart from my work hours when I can spend some time on learning any new tools, read white/research papers in tech, deep-dive on cloud technologies etc. And just like that I raised my first successful PR in Kubernetes for sig/scheduling. And since then, I try to contribute actively every now and then under sig/scheduling, and kubernetes-sigs projects like scheduler-plugins, descheduler, kube-scheduler-simulator. I don’t want to mention anything about how great and welcoming Kubernetes community is. You definitely gotta try it yoselves to understand it :)

I also planned to appear for few certifications which involves a cloud provider specific certifications, tool based certifications but unfortunately in the first half of the year I was chained into the swift hands of Covid-19 virus. In-fact my whole family was infected with covid and this resulted into breaking my rhythm for at-least 2-3 months. The second half, was mostly around improving my programming skills, catching-up on few Infrastructure automation tools. And by the end of the year I’ve managed to purchase one of the long time pending advanced certifications, and I’m preparing to appear for it in February of 2022.

Healthwise, I’ve started with my all time passion Boxing again. Though I’m more of a Muay Thai fan, but due to limited resources here in my current city, I decided to Box again in some popular gyms around my location. It’s been quite on-and-off due to govt. regulations w.r.t Covid-19 spread but I’m still determined to be as regular as I can. Boxing has really helped me in building my endurance, conditioning and also mental focus. I’m not after Olympic Gold or Proffessional Boxing carrier (I’m very old for that :D ) but still want to practice as long as I can to keep myself in good shape.

For 2022, I’ve few plans which I definitely want to put in motion from the very first day. Apart from completing the certifications, continue on OpenSource contributions, I’ve also desired to spend some more time on my own projects aimed towards solving some particular use-cases. As I’ll start working on those, will definitely share my journey through more blog posts. Also, there are few travel plans which I’m pretty hopeful but skeptical due to ongoing Omicron situation in my country at the moment. Hope things will fall in place and we’ll be at peace once again in this new normal.