It’s easy to see the relevance of knowing where you are in space, but sometimes it’s good to reflect where you are in time. When the clock of the year changes and sheds it’s last hours to rise again like a phoenix from its ashes, it’s a good moment to look around, and see what time lies behind you, but also to think about what you might expect in front of you. This is my attempt to do so.

2016 was a year of hard work, dedication, determination, ups and downs, love, life, contemplation, vision, communication, valuable insights and new takes on old concepts. I had the opportunity to meet people that influenced my career and personal life in a big and positive way.

In Q4-16 I’ve decided to start this blog. Why? I want to challenge myself to formulate knowledge in a more tangible way. If I can explain myself in clear and easy to understand terms when I write it down, I create a foundation from which I can work when I start communicating things verbally. It’s a training to be concise, be valuable, convey knowledge and establish opinions.

I started with two series, which resemble my current lines of interest within my work field.

• Full-Stack
  In order to understand how things work, one must go back to the essence of how – but even more important- why it is constructed. In this series I try to touch most parts by making a small application from the ground up.
• Leadership
  Proper leadership is the craft of helping others to develop theirselves, their knowledge and inspire them to bring up the best in theirselves.

So, what’s coming up?

I’m currently working on a couple of posts at the same time. I expect that the update interval will go down a bit, because of moving to a new house and a third child on the way, but nevertheless I’m determined to keep bringing some practical and theoretical stuff to your screens.

Some to expect in 2017:

• I have had a (very good) training by Isabelle Orlando on presentation skills and influencing skills. Of course I can never equate the effect of that training in some words on the screen, but therewhere absolutely some interresting key points that everybody can use and think about to develop their skills. I would like to give a short summary on these.
• MoD is moved to a VPS. During that migration there where a couple of default steps that had to be done. Stuff like, setting up nginx, implementing Letsencrypt certificate to be able to run on https, migrating from wordpress.com to a vps hosted domain, migrating statistics, setting up WordPress and all packages needed for it to run (php and its modules), etc. I can imagine that there are a lot of people that have these issues, are a little bit tech savvy but don’t dare to take that step. An overview of how you do these things might help, not only to get that stuff set up, but also to stimulate familiarizing on more parts then just one (hence full-stack)
• I currently have the two next steps of the Full-Stack series in concept. I’m slightly struggling to remove complexity, e.g. doing TDD on a self-made controller in an MVC setup for the todo list we’ll be working on
• General progression on the series
  • also some more posts about stuff like monitoring, log processing, scalability and stuff like that. Even though I want to keep progressing steadily towards a full product, I also want to divert every now and then and skip some steps (which should fit again later when the series have progressed some more)
  • full-stack is a hands-on series, I want to create more of an equilibrium with the leadership series where we philosophize somewhat more
• Lots of book reviews, summaries, references to good videos, audio fragments and websites. I intend to expand the library significantly.

 

For now, the books are resting in a crate for moving. They’ve found their position in space and time.

It’s now time for our families and friends.

 

I wish you all a magnificent 2017 that is filled with passion, energy, balance, health, knowledge and wisdom!

Tim