2020 - summary of the year

Year 2020 was tough for many of us. I do remember that my initial take on it was much more optimistic. I was considering some of the scenarios and thought about “what could go wrong”, but the reality…

Health

Year 2020 for me brought two major health issues that aren’t Covid19. One of them was related to the backbone. It greatly limited my ability to do any workouts. Unfortunately, due to Covid19, I wasn’t able to get diagnosis and physio in a timely manner. I haven’t fully recovered yet and it looks that it will take much more time then I anticipated.

Open Source

I didn’t create a crazy number of PRs. I think that I did good job in making them impactful though. I described two of my recent PR sprees in Improving Azure Functions performance and Improving Nethermind performance. I think that in the future, I’ll do my best to document further OSS work in the similar manner. Some parts of these entries do not belong to PRs and being vocal about reasoning and following steps seems to be beneficial to you (thanks for the feedback!).

Validating ideas

This year was a really interesting period of time for testing business and product ideas. There wasn’t a lot of survivors though. Some of them were validated just using a landing page, the others, required a bit more of work and using new tools that emerged recently. Killing your own ideas isn’t easy. At the same time, it’s much better to have them validated than to keep them in an everlasting backlog.

Dotnetos

This year was strongly focused on working in and for Dotnetos. There are a few major points in here worth to be mentioned.

We had a new hiring run according to a better recruiting process that resulted in hiring one person. This was a really interesting experience!

Async Expert, the online course for asynchronous programming in .NET, was successfully released and delivered to over 500 attendees. I thought that the process of recording will take less time, but taking into consideration that the course is ~30 hours long, it must have taken a while to get it done.

Diagnostics Expert was the ending theme for this year. We finished the pre-sale and now we’re focusing on the delivery. This is the first course that is created by an external author. We’re responsible for making it a great learning tool, on the same level that we achieved in Async Expert.

The Dotnetos Conference was run in an on-line totally free version. This is the hardest hit that Dotnetos took during 2020. The overall overhead of planning and then cancelling an on-site conference for 500+ people was overwhelming.

Reading

I read 21 books this year. I’m happy with it, especially when I think about the health issues that I had. Beside books, I read tons of whitepapers that mostly aren’t listed on this blog.

One of the areas where I spent a lot of time was the topic of the Capability-based security. This was a really interesting period of 2-3 weeks where I learnt a lot. This knowledge is not applied anywhere. I did it out of interest and the need of trying to understand what is it?.

The other whitepaper reading spree was related to prefix-trees and database indexes. This is related to a thing I’m working on, that needs to deal with a lot of data and indexing it. Unfortunately, just use SQL or put it in the cloud, it’ll work are not the answers here.

Wishes for 2021

I wish you and me much better 2021.

I hope we will positively end the Covid19 madness.

I hope, if you’re impacted by the current situation somehow, you’ll get better.

Wishing us all the best in the new 2021!