There is a sad statement I’ve heard. In this life, there is no goal, no final black and white checkered flag. No hope of things ever stopping. In fact each year things only get slower, your body gets slower to heal, and it has pain easier.

and yet….

In spite of all this we move on. We keep moving forward. We keep pushing. We keep Learning. We keep growing. It doesn’t matter what pain brings us, because pain is inevitable.

“Life is pain highness, and anyone telling you differently is selling something.”

The Princess Bride

It doesn’t matter that its hard, because difficulties are again, just a part of life. We work, we continue, we endure.. In the last year, and in this year, and the on to the next.

The amount of things I was hoping to accomplish in 2021 was a lot. Tons of certification goals, more requirements for work. Also trying to exercise and work through my own growth with strength, and cardio. This year I tried so hard to run, and learn how to run better that I ever have. I went from running 5k 3x a week, to running 5k 3x a week, and adding a 30-40 minute workout each day. This equated to about 2 hours of working out each day. It felt great. I know its hard to believe, but I really did feel like I was doing some amazing things during that time. I was working my job well in-between workouts, but also the workouts were hard and pushed me to learn more about myself. In a bad way too. Because after a month of 2 hour workouts weekdays, I found I had a huge pain in the back of my left foot. When I had it checked out they announced that I had overworked my Achilles tendon and I had to put my left foot in a boot. Now at the end of the year, They are finally saying I can start running again, working out again.

2022, looks like a pretty awesome year right now. I plan to write more, help more, blog, podcast, and grow.

I do these blogs each year as a mile-marker for myself, and also, to help encourage others to create their own goals for the year. Blogging allows me to track what I have done and what I plan to do and track them. This turns these ideas into plans, and goals. Some I’ll hit, and some I wont.

2021 Goals checked off looks like this:

• Obtain Associate level certification in GCP and Azure
• Training in SaltStack
• Obtain Professional Level Certification AWS
• HashiCorp – Associate in Consul and Vault, with professional in Vault.
• Create a Demo Application and start digging into full stack dev. (This is a stretch goal)
• Kubernetes
• Obtain CKAD
• Write a Kubernetes application
• Tanzu!!
• OpenShift!!
• K8s all the things!
• Gain Knowledge of sales
• Understand and prioritize sales opportunities
• Learn dealing with clients as opposed to customers
• Manage to be a big factor in meeting or exceeding the sales quota.
• Workout at least 3 times in a week
• Soft Skills (people skills) – Learn the Non-Tech
• Lose weight

In terms of certifications I did obtain the GCP ACE, Oracle Associate, but Azure only foundations, this is something I need to work on. Its hilarious that the cloud that I work in the most I’m actually certified the least. Its funny how that works. I also didn’t get a professional level cert for AWS. Next year that changes.

This year the majority of work that I did was in sales, learning the craft of my job, and what is my place to help the people around me. This is what pulled a ton of time, and for good I think. I learned how to navigate multiple areas. Now that I know these things, I believe to be more prepared for success in 2022. I think these things are more needed between years as they add more skills, yet dont immediately grant a reward like a certification, or fixing something, or building something. However, Its worth mentioning that spending time within your job to find out how they make money, then injecting yourself into that process, is always a good use of time.

One thing of note is how I was pulled off personal Goals to perform tasks needed for work. For instance I went after a certification that required VCP-NV, and VCP-DV, so I got both of those, I also achieved my VCAP-CMA. I’ve done a lot of certifications with VMware this year, and I find that pretty crazy as I keep pushing myself into other areas. No offense to VMware, I just don’t see a lot of growth opportunities where I lack certifications right now. Maybe I’ll get my VCIX at some point, but its not needed for work at all, so not a ton of drive to do it.

I really wanted to dive into full-stack Dev, and know how to prep an application and run it wherever I wanted. However, my job didn’t want me to go that direction, and I found myself re-learning some things that I’ve lost touch with. Not a bad thing at all, but each year we measure how much we want to do our personal goals, vs our work goals, and we endeavor to do our best balancing the two.

I did learn a ton of SaltStack and its been a staple for understanding self-healing structures, configuration management, and day 0 compliance. Its only one tool of many, but its been a great learning experience and has been very helpful to customers to see demonstrations on it.

In 2022 these are my Goals.

• Professional Level Cert in Azure and AWS(Maybe Oracle)
• Terraform Associate re-cert (maybe Professional as well)
• Tanzu VCP, and badge.
• Create trainings, blogs, and workshops

Much shorter list than last year, but considering professional certs can take 6 months, and I’m going for 2, it makes sense to spread it out and hope for the best. Both AWS, and Azure recommend the associate level as well before the professional certs I’m attempting so that will take additional time. Oracle is a wildcard. I didn’t expect to learn anything about Oracle this year until they opened up their training and certification for free. That’s been a great learning experience. Its always good to see how each cloud does different things, because one may be better than the other, and even though AWS tries to be all things to all customers, Azure, GCP, and Oracle do things better in their own ways.

I need to re-cert my Terraform associate. Considering this has been the top blog I have had on this platform I’ll probably re-post on how I past it again for others to see. Yes, I plan on still using Ned as my trainer on pluralsight but I want to get as far into IaC as possible so Pulumi may be in the cards at some point as well.

Tanzu changed their requirements for some of the certifications, so I will need to get those certs. I personally don’t see this as much of a challenge, but its definitely something I need to do by June, so I’m 100% sure I’ll get this done.

Finally, training, teaching, and sharing. This is going to be both for work and personal. I didn’t blog much this year on this platform, but for work, I wrote about 2 blogs a month. I need to adjust this so that this platform is still valid. So I’m going to start writing blogs that are more basic and helpful for quick things. I find that helps keep me being creative, even when I have to write “professionally” for work which can suck my creative juices dry. ITReality has really helped me maintain creativity, and set out content that I hope helps others. Vince has always done a really great job of keeping things on course, and though I tend to push things off course, he always rights the ship. With Richard Kenyon joining on as well, IT Reality will grow even bigger, and will have a lot of guests speaking on a variety of topics in 2022. Its going to be fun.

I hope for a prosperous and happy 2022 for everyone. I hope for light at the end of the Covid tunnel, and I hope for us all to see each other again. Till hope comes real, I’ll continue digging, working, and moving to get these goals rolling.