2018 in Review

A year has come to an end, and now is the time to look back.

This year I’ve learned and run a lot, fail some.

1. Coding

I have found new things to learn through all the year, some of them worth mentioning here are:

Things I’ve learned:

• Go, then build a chat app

• Cryptography, taught by a brilliant teacher

• Google Cloud Platform, for work

• Apache Airflow & Apache Beam for data ingestion (I should write a blog about these)

• Design patterns in Java

Go and Java are two more programming languages that are in my belt now, love to use both of them so far.

Things I’ve dropped:

• Operating System class

• Computer Vision class

The first one is too hard, the second one is not attracted to me anymore, so I decided to quit early.

Things I am going to learn:

• MOOC: Create a programming course in Vietnamese

As you may know, I’m a self-taught developer, hence it will never be enough for me to learn how to code. But I think it might come the time that I am certified to reteach what I’ve learned to those people who just be like me when I started. Hope I will learn new things along the way, too. techcamp.vn is registered and ready to go live. Stay tuned!

• Microservices: Building microservices in Go and Java

I’ve built many monolith applications and none of microservices, so I will try to build one next year.

2. Running

I love running. This year I completed 2 full marathons, one in Danang and another one in Hanoi. I trained hard for the first one, not too hard for the second, because I found out that Hanoi’s air quality is extremely bad for your health. Now I only go to run when AQI is bad for sensitive people group (!?) or lower.

I don’t have much hope for the improvement of air quality in Hanoi next year, so I may not keep the record up. I really feel bad about this.

3. Reading

I read technical books a lot, I’ve subscribed to Safaribooksonline so I can read as many books as I want. Video tutorials are quite good, too.

Some non-technical books I’ve read this year include “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, and some that I can’t remember.

Next year I will keep track of all non-technical books I read in Goodreads so I will have some things to write in the year end post.

2018 is a satisfied year for me. More chances in 2019 for me to explore. Can’t wait!