Beyond the Code II: My Journey in 2024

The second year of life of the blog is coming to an end (I still can’t believe that 24 months have passed already) and like last year, I would like to look back and reflect on everything that has happened to me during this time, see what goals have been met, see the milestones achieved and propose new ones.

What has happened this year?

In general, I can say that this year has been a year of many changes, which can be classified into professional and personal.

Professionally

Regarding my professional work, I have been in three different projects. I started the year working in the project I was already working on during the last months of the year, it was focused on backend development and APIs with Django Rest Framework, in the middle of the year I had the opportinuty to work for a few months on a project focused on Infrastructure as Code with AWS and their CDK, and finally, a change of company in an international environment and again focused on backend development with Django.

Considering this, I would say it has been a year of great professional growth, I have demonstrated my adaptability to change, facing new and demanding challenges (and even being congratulated for the result achieved!) and I think it has been the year when I have acquired more skills and confidence.

On a personal note

Regarding the blog and other personal projects, my main goal for this year was to increase the quality of the posts and make one or two interesting projects that I could share here. Regarding the former, I think I have been able to considerably increase the quality of the posts and I have even modified and made some changes to the old ones to give a little more context and adapt it to this new “quality standard” that I want to bring to the blog.

In reference to the projects, I was able to develop a project of a chess game bot, where I had a lot of fun and I was able to defeat my friend with an elo of Chess Master. Another project was the documentation and expansion of my local homeserver. Besides this, I managed to update the blog theme and apply the new changes along with my personal changes, which was not an easy task.

So overall I think the balance is also positive.

What do I expect for next year?

Professionally

Professionaly, I aim to continue growing my skill set, particularly in the field of backend development and infrastructure. One goal is to deepen my expertise in cloud technologies, perhaps diving further into AWS or exploring other platforms like Azure, and lastly, I would like to become more proficient in DevOps practices, as I’ve found great satisfaction in working with tools like the CDK.

Regarding the blog

For the blog, I plan to continue raising the bar on content quality and consistency. I’d like to write more technical tutorials, go deeper into complex topics, and create posts that could serve as resources for others in the industry or my future self.

In terms of personal projects, I have ideas for a couple of new challenges:

• Developing an API with FastAPI. I have never mentioned it in this blog but personally I have been able to learn a lot about this framework and apply it to some private projects, and now I would like to do something to share here.
• Enhancing my homelab even further, possibly incorporating container orchestration with tools like Kubernetes.

I may ultimately pursue these two projects, or I may pursue others, or neither. But as a general idea I think it is a good starting point. Let’s see!

Quote

And to finish this post and also to continue with the tradition, another quote from one of my favourite Brandon Sanderson’s works, in this case from Rhythm of War:

Some people charged toward the goal, running for all they had. Others stumbled. But it wasn’t the speed that mattered. It was the direction they were going.

― Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War