After one year of silence - back again!

October 28, 2018

After one year of silence on this blog, I’m back again. This silence was intended. After writing my book in 2017, I felt somehow a kind of fatigue about writing. My blog suffered as well. What did I do in the meantime? Here’s a list of some noteworthy things.

I’m working since january as a full stack developer for a local customer and doing lots of JavaScript/React stuff, as well as all the automation & deployment stuff of our application to AWS cloud. We’re using different services like S3, ElasticBeanstalk, Lambda, SQS, SNS, SES and Secrets Manager. All the infrastructure is “documented” and scripted as code with Cloudformation. I really learned a lot and it is a lot of fun working with all that stuff. I’m pretty much in DevOps and infrastructure/deployment things currently, and it doesn’t feel bad.

At the same time I started this gig, I started to loose weight. Not as a result of disease, but the scale showed somehow too much weight and I didn’t want to go on with that in my life. So I started my personal #project80 and lost 21 kilograms in the first 9 months in 2018. I achieved this in changing my diet (less carbohydrates, more proteins and valuable fats) and starting again with sports. Weight training and endurance sports. Naturally the best combination.

Today the above values have further improved, I’m fitter than ever and I just did my first-again (since 2014) 10k run with a sub 50 mins time. This is really cool and I am really, really happy about that. Next year there will be a half-marathon and a triathlon again. Looking forward to that!

During summer, I also did something “completely different” for my body and my mind. I did complete my education as a fitness trainer on A and B certificate level, plus a personal trainer and medical fitness trainer licence. This was fun, learning something different than all this IT/software stuff I’m doing all day. First and foremost I did all this for myself, because I wanted to learn more about anatomy, physiology and training science. But I think I’ll try to work part-time as a personal trainer in future.

This was not the only certification I did this year. Currently I’m also certified on AWS cloud. Although it’s only the “cloud practitioner” certification - a kind of sales & marketing cert - I can call myself “AWS certified”. Most customers and recruiters don’t know about certification and if there’s at least any kind of cert, they’ll be happy. So do I. :smirk:

AWS certified

As well as my writings and publications, my conference talks suffered a bit in 2018. It was good to have a period with less talks, only doing a few selected ones. But I will be back in 2019, hopefully. First talks are already accepted (see e.g. JavaLand).

2018 will end for me with a three-weeks cruise trip from Dubai to Singapore. I’m really excited and looking forward to this. Seeing a lot of countries and cultures and eating a lot of local (street) food. And as a good completion of this trip, I will give a talk at JUG Singapore while I’m there.

So, expect more from me again in 2019.
I’ll be back!

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