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Goodbye 2016: Year in review
Dec 31, 2016

Two years ago I wrote a tiny post about rebooting this blog. I’m happy to say I was able to do that this year 2016, still there’s a long way ahead but progress has been made.

To tell the truth I did not have plans to set monthly reading goals, but having read 20 books in 2015 definitely inspired me to continue with the good habit of reading and learning on my own, just like I used to when I was in high school and college, trying to become a better person and engineer at the same time, all of this because I want to.

Professionally I need to keep motivating myself, find the time to read, learn and code on my own limited free time, because there’s no other way to get better, and I must say I’ve been slacking off and getting technologically stagnated for the last five years, all of that had to change at one point in time. Year 2016 was the trigger in this change.

I know 2016 has been a sad year for a lot of people, a lot of crazy things happened in the world, a lot of musicians and actors that I used to listen to and watch when I was younger are gone, considering how the year is ending I know for sure 2017 will be more difficult for everybody, but I won’t give up, I really want to become a better person, a better professional and a better family man. I know for sure I can’t control what happens around the country and the world, but I can control the most important variable: me, and I will do that.

From the professional point of view, I will be going all in with Go, a programming language suggested by one our engineers about 2 years ago. Crazy how much time I wasted before making this official. I believe Go is a programming language capable of shifting development, its performance and cleanness are what I like the most about it. I will still be using Ruby because there’s a ton of legacy code still written in that language, but every single new service that does not heavily depend on any Ruby interfaces will be written in Go. There’s no way back, I like Go, its community and I believe it is the best decision for my career. Ruby and Ruby on Rails were nice, but it’s time to move on.

From the personal point of view, reading will keep me up to date, my books wishlists include both technical books as well as personal growth/soft skill books. I’ll start to read those together with the technical ones as well.

In the end 2016 did work for me, I was able to accomplish what I wanted:

  1. Read more books than the year before, in 2016 I finished reading 31 books, 11 more than in 2015.
  2. Have multiple Go programs running in production with success.
  3. Normalize all projects back at work, including code styling, building processes and specially increase code coverage to at least 90% each.
  4. Use Docker more often, personally and professionally.

In 2017 I will rise my expectations higher otherwise what’s the point?


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