Siva

Lessons and Milestones: My 2024 Journey

Share this post:

First and foremost, I wish you a very Happy New Year! I hope 2025 brings incredible opportunities and happiness your way.

As we step into the new year, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on 2024—sharing my achievements, lessons learned, and the journey it brought me on.

A short Career Break

I was working as a Developer Advocate at AtomicJar and AtomicJar was acquired by Docker. By Jan 2024, we officially became part of the Docker team, but I was there at Docker only for a couple of months.

Due to some health issues, I had to take a few months of career break and I hoped to join back at Docker. Unfortunately, Docker couldn’t give me such a long break, so I had to leave the job.

During this break, I strictly followed some healthy habits and recovered quicker than I expected.

In our 20’s we can eat whatever we want and digest anything without any problem. But from late 30’s onwards, we need to be mindful about our diet. Also, we may love fiddling with new technologies even on weekends, but at least make 1 day as “No Screen Day” giving rest to our eyes.

Published “Spring Boot MicroServices Course” on YouTube

I always wanted to create a course demonstrating how to build a complete application with industry following coding practices. I have published Spring Boot MicroServices Course on YouTube

I received very positive feedback about this video series.

New Job at JetBrains

Once I felt better, I started looking for a new job and got an amazing opportunity to work at JetBrains as a Java Developer Advocate. I am very thankful to many people who helped me in finding the new job.

After joining JetBrains, I did a Livestream about Developing Spring Boot Applications With Joy in which I demonstrated a few very cool IntelliJ IDEA features for Spring Boot application developers.

I have published a few articles on JetBrains blog too.

Public Speaking

In 2024, I had the opportunity to speak at a few meetups and conferences.

I have also had the pleasure of talking to Josh Long, DaShaun and Dan Vega.

I hope I will get more opportunities to speak at conferences in 2025.

Lessons Learned

Life continues to teach new lessons, always. The year 2024 is no exception.

Unexpected/disappointing response from someone that changed the way I think about knowledge sharing

When I was a junior developer, I couldn’t afford to pay a lot of money to buy courses. Also, I couldn’t find a mentor who could help me in understanding complex topics and provide career guidance. I never forgot where I came from, and that is one of the reasons I always try to share my knowledge for FREE via blogs and YouTube videos. I also respond to questions via emails and Twitter DMs as much as possible if at all I can help.

Recently, I asked a small group of people to give some feedback on my article so that I can improve if there is a scope. Only a couple of people responded and provided their feedback, and the rest of them didn’t even bother to respond. I understand that people may be busy with their work, may not have time to respond.

But one reply shocked me and made me reconsider how I am spending my time. The reply was not about the content, and I don’t want to share more details about his response. I realized that “We should never put other’s priorities before ours”.

It took me a few days to process this and reconsider how I am going to spend my time going forward. I learned the lesson “If you are good at something, never do it for free” in the hard way.

Looking forward to 2025

Now AI is everywhere, and I am sure AI is going to stay. I would like to explore and leverage AI tools for my work. I have already explored a couple of tools, and it’s mind-blowing. While these AI tools are not generating the perfect code, the generated code looks 80% similar to what I would have written. That’s a great boost for developer productivity.

There are many amazing features being developed in IntelliJ IDEA, especially for Spring Boot developers. I am planning to create content on those features, and I am sure you will enjoy those new features very well.

Finally, I hope to attend some international conference(s) this year and meet my online friends in-person.

I wish you all a very successful year and have fun :-)

Share this post:

Related content

comments powered by Disqus