SivaLabs

I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions or making big 5-year plans! But I do realize that making a list of things I want to do keeps me focused on those things and minimizes distractions.

Before talking about my grand plans for 2018, let me take a moment and see how my 2017 was.

What I did in 2017

• I wrote a new book, Beginning Spring Boot 2, with Apress publishers.
• I learned a lot of good practices at ThoughtWorks.
• I gave a conference talk on MicroServices at the DevConHyd 2017 Conference.
• I gave a GeekNight talk on Cloud-Native Applications using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
• I quit my job to start my own consulting gig.
• Learned to Say NO

The year 2017 was a wonderful year for me in many ways.

Public speaking

I am a very shy person and have a great fear of public speaking, especially in front of a large audience. But I gave a talk on MicroServices at the DevConHyd 2017 Conference, which went fine (I felt it was okayish).

I learned from my mistakes, and after a month, I gave a GeekNight talk on Cloud-Native Applications using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud, which went much better (I felt it was much better) and received very good feedback from the audience.

Started saying NO more often

Like many people, I too had this problem of NOT saying NO to things that I don’t really like to do. It is not so easy to say NO, especially to people close to you. But I am getting good at it now. At least I learned to say, “I will think about it and let you know,” instead of saying YES on the spot.

Realized health is more important (one more time)

I had gone through a minor surgery and realized that nothing is more important than health.

I should have taken care of my health by doing simple things like:

• Drinking more water
• Going for a morning walk for 30 minutes daily
• Taking short breaks during work hours
• Setting up a proper workstation (table, chair, etc.) instead of putting a laptop on my lap and working long hours

My new shiny MacBook

Recently, I realized that it is getting more and more painful to work on the Windows OS because many tools (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) are not working well on Windows.

I gave enough trials to make Linux my desktop OS, but most of the time I spent time fixing Wi-Fi disconnect issues and battery draining problems instead of doing what I wanted to do.

So finally, I bought a MacBook Pro 15-inch, which Amazon delivered on Dec 31st.

Switched to IntelliJ IDEA

After using Eclipse (STS, actually) for almost 10+ years, I finally switched to IntelliJ IDEA because that’s what everyone uses at my company, and we do pair programming all the time. Now I am liking IntelliJ IDEA more and more.

My plans for 2018

• Become a Corporate Trainer for Java and Spring
• Write blog posts more often (2 per week?)
• Make small video tutorials (2 per month?)
• Planning to write a new book on Building an e-commerce application using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud
• Make Kotlin my primary programming language
• Learn the Go programming language (probably in the 3rd quarter of 2018)
• Learn a new language/framework/library every month (inspired by Shekar Gulati’s weekly series)
  • Kafka
  • Kubernetes
  • Redis
• Learn NodeJS and VueJS a little more in-depth
• Take a 1-week vacation every 3 months
• Do exercise regularly

I hope 2018 will be more challenging and more rewarding too. :-)