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It’s been a really intensive and interesting year. As we’re getting closer to start the new one, it’s a good time for a summary. Let me share a few most meaningful items that made a significant impact during this period.

Morning ritual

This year was probably the best so far in terms of keeping up with my morning ritual. The ritual itself includes:

1. meditation
2. stretching
3. reading books
4. reviewing my calendar

This is not something big, but it’s meaningful, repeatable and helps me with making my days predictably good. This year proved that if I my days are predictably good, there will be outliers bringing awesomeness for free.

Reading books

So far I read 32 books during this year. Again, this is a result of a planned repeatable activity related to reading in the morning. Having a reading ritual helped a lot. Again, as in 2017, my aim was to read 20 non-technical, non-fiction books. Every single book that I read was reviewed (even with a few short sentences) and marked as read on my GoodReads profile. The repetitive process of wake-up-read-review works pretty nicely so far and I’m not going to change it.

Dotnetos

This year was the first year of the Dotnetos initiative that I created with Łukasz Pyrzyk and Konrad Kokosa. The idea behind was to talk about .NET performance and bring knowledge and experience related to this topic. We started with a tour across Poland, where we visited 5 cities within 5 days (like a real rock band!). The same year we delivered a one day conference, focusing solely on the .NET performance. To share some numbers, the very first conference was rated (average) at 4.81 using scale from 1 to 5. Still, when I recall it, there’s a smile on my face.

This for sure was not the last word from Dotnetos and you’ll be hearing about us soon!

Microsoft MVP

I’ve been renominated as Microsoft MVP. Microsoft & community: thank you for your support and giving me opportunity to be recognized as one of community contributors.

Warsaw .NET User Group step down

I stepped down from being Warsaw .NET User Group leader. Too much on my plate, living outside of Warsaw, working remotely (no longer being able to attend the meetings after work) and having some personal plans for the next year - these were the reasons.

Talks

Trying to limit the number, I gave 13 talks. If this was a limited number, what would have happened if… ;-)

Personal stuff

On the personal level happened a lot. I don’t mean family, no divorces, marriages etc. This was by design, probably one of the toughest years so far, but it brought a lot of goodness.

Open Source

I limited my Open Source involvement. The only thing that I released was QueueBatch, the thing that I extracted from another project of mine. It has been released to address major inefficiencies when using Azure Storage Queues bindings for Azure Functions. It’s really fast and helps you to do smart batching, a really underestimated pattern.

Summary

This was a really good year, designed to be predictably good. I’m hoping for the next one, to get even more bored with this predictability.

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Comments

You do an awesome job! MVP well deserved. Congrats!

by Dariusz Pawlukiewicz at 2018-12-19 09:02:30 +0000

:hugs:

by Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' at 2018-12-19 12:28:59 +0000

Don Scooletz when can we hear something about DotNetos? More perf please!

And of course nice year. What plans do you have for 2019?

by Krzysztof Madej at 2018-12-19 14:26:56 +0000

Don Krzysztof, hopefully we'll be able to share more in January. Working hard to do it as soon as possible.

by Szymon Kulec 'Scooletz' at 2018-12-19 20:29:47 +0000