2013 - The Year Ahead, 2012 - The Year Lookback

First of all Happy New Year to you all. Honestly speaking this post was due in first week of this month but it’s not too late for new year’s resolution. As matter of fact I desperately wanted to write this post - to share my excitement for year 2013 and also humbling experience in 2012.

2012

2012 was phenomenal, both personally and professionally especially considering a rather depressing 2011. I will be honest, excellent outcomes in 2012 was reflection of work done in previous years.

Personal Highlights

Personal first, I got married after being in relationship for 4 year. This was undoubtedly biggest personal highlight of the year 2012. I met Tomoe (my wife) in 2008 in Auckland. She has been very supportive, nice and just a super-amazing person to be with. In year 2012, I started thinking about things that really matter to me: a good work-life balance, good health, traveling, reading, friends and family. I stopped thinking too much about things I can not control or I don’t want to control. Focused my energy on myself and diverted myself away from negative energy.

Professional Highlights

Professional second, I joined Cotton On as e-commerce technical lead. Despite the fact that I had no background in retail and or e-commerce I did quite well. Professionally there were many up and downs in year 2012 but overall it was quite productive. With help of a team of amazing people I was able to lead technical launch of 4 e-commerce websites in less than 10 months, two of them are high traffic (million hits in a day) and high transaction websites.

I moved away from my bioinformatics and discovery informatics background and decided to not look back. After one year I am nearly out of touch. I still owe a post why I decided to not pursue active research as my career path.

Every year I work on specializing in certain technical areas. In 2012, I did some excellent work with DevOps and AWS that I am particularly proud of.

2013

I have a lot of plans and resolution for this year. I am realistic about the plans and I think most of them are achievable.

Personal Goals And Resolutions

1. Eat less, exercise more regularly. Be healthy.
2. Don’t stay in home on weekends for hacking. Do some hacking every morning.
3. Less of tablets and smart phones. Avoid using gadgets in family time.
4. Learn professional photography. Travel more and buy a decent camera.
5. Write more frequently. Read more. Share as you learn via notes.

Professional Goals And Resolutions

1. Keep learning DevOps and Cloud. Focus on Hadoop and database operations.
2. Keep learning the digital payment methods. Focus on emerging trends and security.
3. Learn web reliability engineering. Focus on system chaos and stress.
4. Master the agile development process. Focus on tool sets and communication framework.
5. Write more code. Contribute back to open source community.