Revisiting 2016
Mainly to recall what happened last year and to give thoughts and planning for upcoming year(s) I’m once again revisiting the last year (previous years: 2015, 2014, 2013 + 2012). Here we go:
Events:
- attended three conferences (OSDC in Germany, Linuxdays Graz + Debconf16 in Capetown)
- invited panel participant at Digitaldialog Privacy
Technology / Open Source:
- bunch of Gerrit, Jenkins, Docker, Debian + jenkins-debian-glue related work
- digged further into automated testing, especially with goss + sikuli (hope to have something available I can talk about in public in 2017/2018)
- sadly another year without an official stable Grml release (but we made progress in Q4 and a new stable release should be available in Q1/2017)
Music:
- Bought a Cajón, my kids loving it as much as I do :)
- Played the drums more often in the beginning of 2016, went down close to zero in the second half of 2016 (meh)
Sports:
- Bought a unicycle and started to learn to ride it in summer (got stuck since then without progress)
- Played less Badminton (as expected since I skipped the whole summer holidays season, but went kind of regularly during winter and summer terms otherwise) and played close to never Table Tennis (mainly due to date collisions with my sparring partner but also due to other time constraints), though managed to keep my handicap more or less in both sports
Business:
- Third year of business with SynPro Solutions, very happy with what we achieved and very glad to have such fantastic partners
- Started to gather more metrics around my work related to Grml Solutions, SynPro Solutions + Grml-Forensic for better (capacity) planning (that’s something I’d like to talk about in public at some point)
Personal:
- Reading activities was mainly around newspapers and articles, sadly not so many books
- First year of kindergarten for my older daughter, this brought us into a school-like schedule I wasn’t used to anymore (I’m finally starting to adopt to it though, also related to capacity planning efforts)
- Took two months of child care time (great time!), later on also taking care of my kids every Monday and half of Tuesday – this turned out to be way more stressful than expected (having just ~30 hours left per week for normal working hours and all my business duties, this is also the main reason why I started with the metrics thingy)
Conclusion: 2016 was quite different to previous years, mainly because of being very time-constrained on all sides. One of the most challenging years overall. I’m planning to change quite some things for 2017 (started to do so already in Q4/2016), hoping for the best.