Happy New Year’s Everybody! While it most definitely had its high points 2013 over all was a bit challenging for me. So with that said and a liberal dose of optimism I have to say that I am looking forward to what 2014 will put before us. While I’m sure the employer will have me start outlining some goals to work towards there, I’d like to share some personal goals I’ve thought of for 2014.
Enhance my scripting skills. Namely this means powershell, python, and esxcli with the end goal being to start performing greater automation throughout the enterprise. For years I’ve got by with some decent use of vbscript to do the basics on the Windows side of the shop because that’s where most of the need was. As our needs have started shifting towards the virtualization side and with the coming wave of Software Defined Networking (SDN) it’s about time I start learning something new.
Become VCP5 certified. Last year ended up being a pretty Cisco centric year for me from an educational standpoint with me reupping my CCNA and adding a CCNA Voice to the mix, not to mention attending Cisco Live. This year I want to build upon the VCA-Datacenter I gained recently and finally get around to doing the VCP 5 Datacenter exam. I’m still not a big fan of Vmware’s enforced class policy for certfication, but as I’ve already taken the Install, Configure and Manage vSphere 4 class this means all I have to take is the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 course.
Blog More on the Macro. One good thing about 2013 is I did what for me was a lot of blogging, mostly at 4sysops.com. I think in total I posted about 15-20 times last year and in the process I managed to start blogging for myself again, something I haven’t done in years. This year while I’ll still do some of the straight how to pieces that I did quite a bit of last year I want to use this medium to help myself find new ways of thinking and get out of my comfort zone, so expect to see more posts like this in the new year.
Attend a major IT conference again. Last year I had the great experience of attending Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida. It is always a good thing to be able to immerse yourself in situations where you can expand your knowledge and this was that ability on a grand scale. While I don’t know if it will be Cisco Live again this year, most likely it will be Vmworld, I definitely want to make this a yearly thing rather than an outlier.
Refocus on health (start running again!) For the past couple of years I’ve done what I consider to be a great job of focusing on my health and I have seen some pretty darn good outcomes, with any measure I can think of showing positive trends. For the past 6 months or so I’ve seen this focus wan as other things in life have done an excellent job of getting in the way, but this is something I want/need to change. I’m going to get back in the habit or running 3 or 4 times a week. Further look for a post in the near future regarding some of the mobile technologies I’ve found to be really helpful in managing your weight and overall health.
Provide greater training to fellow coworkers. This would be mostly to get more utilization out of already in place systems and greater efficiency out of staff. From our perspective this would mean less call IT, more doing. There are many ways you can describe my employer, but the way I tend to think of it is as a smaller medium size business with an enterprise point of view when it comes to technology. Over the course of the last few years we’ve made some great strides in putting new technology in place to increase the ability of our staff to collaborate and some have really caught on, others not so much. In a lot of these cases I think the lack of use comes from a general lack of understanding of how it works and I hope to rectify that this year.
Well that seems like plenty of list as it is so I’m going to go ahead and stop there. How about you? What goals do you have for this year? Let me know either in the comments below or on twitter @k00laidIT.
