SivaLabs

Happy new year to you :-)

I don’t really believe in new year resolutions or making big 5 year plans!! But I do realize that by making a list of things that I want to do keeps me focus on those things and minimize the distractions.

Before going to talk about my grand plans for 2018 let me take moment and see how was my 2017.

What I did in 2017

• I wrote a new book Beginning Spring Boot 2 with Apress publishers
• I learned a lot of good practices at ThoughtWorks
• I gave a conference talk on MicroServices at DevConHyd 2017 Conference
• I gave a GeekNight talk on Cloud Native Applications using SpringBoot and Spring Cloud
• I quit my job to start my own consulting gig
• Learned to Say NO

The year 2017 is a wonderful year for me in many ways.

Public speaking

I am very shy person and fear a lot about public speaking, especially in front of large audience. But I gave a talk on MicroServices at DevConHyd 2017 Conference which went fine (I felt it is okayish).

I learned from my mistakes and after a month I gave a GeekNight talk on Cloud Native Applications using SpringBoot and Spring Cloud which went much better (I felt it is much better) and received very good feedback from audience.

Started saying NO more often

Like many people, I too had this problem of NOT saying NO to things that I don’t really like to do. It is not so easy to say NO, especially to the people close to you. But I am getting good at it now. At least I learned to say I will think and let you know instead of saying YES on the spot.

Realized health is more important (one more time)

I had gone through a minor surgery and realized that Nothing is more important than health.

I should have taken care of health by doing simple things like:

• Drinking more water
• Going for a morning walk for 30 minutes daily
• Taking short breaks during work hours
• Setting up proper workstation (table, chair etc) instead of putting laptop on my lap and working long hours

My new shiny MacBook

Recently I realized that it is getting more and more painful to work on Windows OS because many tools (Docker, Kubernetes etc) are not working well on Windows.

I gave enough trials to make Linux as my desktop OS but most of the times I spend time on fixing WIFI disconnect issues, Battery draining problems instead of doing what I want to do.

So finally I bought a MacBook Pro 15-inch which Amazon delivered Dec 31st.

Switched to Intellij IDEA

After using Eclipse(STS actually) for almost 10+ years, I finally switched to Intellij IDEA because that’s what everyone uses at my company and we do pair programming all the times. Now I am liking Intellij IDEA more and more.

My plans for 2018

• Become a Corporate Trainer on Java and Spring
• Write blog posts more often (2 per week??)
• Make small video tutorials (2 per month??)
• Planning to write a new book on Building e-commerce application using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud
• Make Kotlin as my primary programming language
• Learn Go programming language (probably in 3rd quarter of 2018)
• Learn a new language/framework/library every month (Inspired by Shekar Gulati weekly series)
  • Kafka
  • Kubernetes
  • Redis
• Learn NodeJS and VueJS a little more in-depth
• Take 1 week vacation for every 3 months
• Do exercise regularly

I hope 2018 year would be more challenging and more rewarding too :-)