fkr

Everyone[TM] is posting their end-of-year review-of-the-year posts. While 2022 definitly was an interesting year, I don’t want to bore the hell out of you with an in-depth stare in my rearview mirror. Especially since likely one drives of the road if one just stares in the rearview mirror. That however is no excuse of not looking back at all.

Throughout 2022 I adjusted some of my habits and how I organize myself. I elaborated in another post how I organize myself and my week and part of that has been looking back at the past week. What I adjust is how I do that. I switched to a bullet journal a few months ago - a hand written bullet journal. Part of my weekly routine is a weekly retrospective where I check-in with myself and do take a look at the past week in order to identify where things went well and where there is the need for improvement. Generally I switched to more hand-writing. Interestingly I also went back to be reading books on paper again. For non-fiction I mostly did that ever since (well, I often have the e-book too, just to have them handy whenever) but for fiction I went back to paper books as well. Speaking of reading, if I have to restrict myself to recommend only one non-fiction and one fiction books of the ones I read in 2022, these would be:

• Non-fiction: Empowered - Ordinary people, extraordinary products by Marty Cagan
• Fiction: 11/22/63 by Stephen King

On a broader scale looking at the decisions that lead to the job changes in 2022 I’m very happy with the move to join the SCS team at the OSB Alliance. For many years I’ve had a button on one of my backpacks that is labeled “more less” and just as I’m strongly convinced that unlimited growth in a world of finite resources is not possible, I do believe that personal development is not just defined by the bigger, larger and more route but instead by variety and diversity of the views perceived. Just as all previous years, 2022 has proofed this point ;)

While i never saw myself as pure tech-nerd I do notice that my view on things becomes more broad and while I love engineering cool stuff and creating awesome products, the real leverage lies elsewhere.

But speaking of engineering and awesome products, there are a few side projects that I was able to bring forward and that will get some more attention in the upcoming months.

One of these side project is nprobe, which is a smokeping replacement I’ve been working on. Smokeping is an awesome piece of software but it has aged and there are some annoyances - especially in distributed environments - with it. nprobe will solve those. I’m still in the experimenting phase with it. Right now nprobe requires an influx database. I want to switch away from that - for the datastore I’m currently looking into timescaledb. Currently nprobe is in a state where I experiement with some ideas. The whole configuration needs to become much more flexible and with more magic, likely I’ll publish something for that soonish.

Another of my side projects I covered in a separate post: A side dish is still a dish.

For the SCS side of things, we’ve achieved major milestones - the more important ones are coming up in 2023 and already the calendar is filling up. Ranging from the Sovereign Cloud DevRoom at FOSDEM, to the next SCS hackathon as well as the next release (R4) coming up in March and up to the OpenInfra Summit in Summer in Vancouver.