My 2019 IT Year End Review
Date Created: January 1, 2020
Last Updated: January 1, 2020
Background
This is my first IT year-end review, so I’m not sure what would be a good format. We’ll just call this post a “practice IT year-end review”, so the reviews in the 2020 decade will be EPIC!!! (Yes, I’m working on marketing right now…)
I chose not to include personal or job specific information in this IT year-end review. Many of my comments would need context, so not worth going into details here. Overall 2019 wasn’t a bad year, but nothing really awesome to include either. Instead I will focus on IT activities that were “outside” of regular work hours/facility that was interesting to me in 2019.
2019 IT Conferences
I’ll highlight a couple IT Conferences that I attended in 2019
Minne Analytics HALICON 2019 - Health Care Data Science conference back in March. If you have not attended a Minne Analytics conference before, I strongly recommend making that a 2020 resolution. The four (or five?) conferences I have attended were outstanding. Minne Analytics conferences provide great speakers, format and networking opportunities with folks in the Minnesota Tech community.
Twin Cities Code Camp - This conference has been going on for some time, however 2019 was the first one I attended. The conference was great - I’m looking forward to attending 2020 conference in April.
Meetups in the Minnesota Tech community are also a great way to network and learn. I didn’t attend as many in 2019 compared to previous years. The 2019 meetups I did attend were great, and many thanks to the organizers and sponsors of those meetings.
IT Side Projects — JavaScript Frameworks
In 2018 I began dabbling in Angular, React and Vue.js with no real specific target in mind. I’ve heard about these frontend JavaScript frameworks and libraries, but didn’t take the extra time and effort to gain a better understanding.
At the beginning of 2019 I started two simple Angular static web sites. The web sites were similar in page structure, build and deployment. One is hosted on a cPanel web hosting site, the other on GitHub pages. More information about each site below
https://leseanbruneau.com - Intent was for a personal IT professional web site. I generally lack “professionalism”, so content was hard to come up with. I’ll work on that in 2020… (Maybe.)
https://landsharkpark.github.io - Intent was for a site dedicated to my casual interest in horse racing. This site was fun to throw some things out there and was a good test site when I implemented new Angular features.
Personal Web Sites Lessons Learned
Bad
- I didn’t have direction for what I ultimately wanted. Once I created the web sites, I found it hard to find motivation to continue.
- Both web sites were static, so any updates required a new build and deployment. Not a big deal, but that little extra effort amounted to a lot to time throughout the year.
- Two sites were too much for year one while trying to update content. I spent more time trying to add content, which took away time from learning Angular design and formatting pages.
Good
- “A job done is a job well done” - Something is better than nothing. It is nice to have a professional site for personal branding.
- Great gobs, and gobs and more gobs of learning. At times it seemed like I was pumping money into the swear jar faster than the Federal Reserve was expanding their Q4 balance sheet. So a few 2019 confessions were a little expensive - what can you do?
- I gained knowledge and ideas for content and “how to” going forward.
2020 Goals
Why not throw out a few 2020 goals
1. Get more involved in Minnesota Tech community
2. Continue to learn by working on side projects
3. Take a 100 Code Challenge
4. Digital Declutter - I say this every year, but never do. Maybe this will be the year.
Personal web site goals
https://leseanbruneau.com - Keep update to date information on myself and the MNTech calendar. Move the data content from MNTech calendar into a database or REST API endpoint to make it easier to update and maintain.
https://landsharkpark-mn.firebaseapp.com - This is my new horse racing site - also a project to learn React. This site started with create-react-app and I have been slowly adding features.
https://lesean-100days.firebaseapp.com - A small, quick React application to journal my 100 day code challenge. Content on main page is from Google Firebase, so daily updates will be easy to maintain throughout the challenge.
Wrap up
Hope everyone has a great 2020 year and decade. Thanks for reading and have a great day!
