I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

The last review of the year. I need to set new goals, but I’ll actually do that the first week of the year, taking a little time next week to think.

2021 Grade: C+

I don’t think I did OK here with the year of goals, but I learned a few things about setting goals and how to tackle them for next year. That will inform my view of the future.

This year wasn’t supposed to be as busy. With no real end to the pandemic in sight, I thought I’d be home more often, with a little more time to work on myself, but that was a mistake. I got quite busy, and I found myself spending more time away from deep technical topics.

Not a bad thing, but it affected my goals. As usual, reading is easier for me than working on technical problems, and that aligns with a lot of what I do for work.

Here is where I finished in the various areas:

Reading

I’ve been working through a few books around the fiction that captivates me. I like the feedback book, but I find myself stopping and thinking often. It’s going slower than expected. The Project to Product was good, making me rethink how I would tackle software in a company.

The GE one was personally interesting as I wanted to work there when I was in university. It’s almost more of a history book, but it confirms what I thought. A dysfunctional place to work that played with finance more than they were amazing business people. They were good business people, but not the star it appeared from the outside.

The PoSh book was a bit of a project, but I enjoyed it. I highly recommend this one.

Here’s the current progress:

• Non fiction – Project to Product – 100%
• Career – Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric – 100%
• Career – Thanks for the Feedback – 52%
• Technical – dbatools in a Month of Lunches – 100% (of what’s in the EAP)

Technical Skills

Here are the items I was aiming to work on this year:

• Certification –  AZ-900 – 0% (2 modules)
• Certification – DP-900 – 50% (14 modules)
• 50% of this is studying the general material
• 20% is the focused review
• 30% the test
• Skills – T-SQL – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25 (2021 puzzles 4)
• Skills – Python – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25
• Skills – PowerShell – 2020 Advent of Code – 6/25

Projects

My projects were in these areas.

• Support Local Events (or whatever the data platform one day event thing is)
  • Added 3 events manually in 2021
  • Managed to get SQL Saturday set up as an independent charity, a US 501.c.3 corp
  • 2 SQL Saturday events in 2021 (1 in-person, 1 virtual)
• Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation
• Spoke at 2 groups. The third hasn’t had meetings.
• I did speak at 4 remote user groups
• Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual
• Semi-failure. There wasn’t much interest in either, but I did get my session to the user group to be hybrid, and some people appreciated this.
• Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – Didn’t complete this, but it’s working for kids and parents to see some stats.