Summary of 2019 – What Did I Learn?

Azure

Last year I passed the Azure 70-532 certification exam (Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions). For this year I tried to pass “version 2” of that exam: AZ-203 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure. The main reason was that former certification expired in December 2019. I started to study for it in autumn and practically it took all of my time and I didn’t have much time doing other things like blogging and learning Angular (which was one of my goals for 2019). Eventually, I couldn’t take the exam in 2019, but I took it on 2020 January. Unfortunately, I didn’t pass it: I got 689 points while the passing score was 700. So close! I will retake the exam in near days and this time I will pass it!

While 2018 was my first year with Azure, 2019 I was more familiar with it. I can say I know many things in Azure, and kinda stabilized my Azure knowledge. I have to say I like Azure and the cloud. As the cloud is coming more and more mainstream I will focus on learning Azure more in 2020. (And I may study some other cloud environment in 2020 as well.)

Azure DevOps

In addition to Azure, I work with Azure DevOps daily. I have a dream of “complete” CI/CD pipeline which will deploy to production via “button press” and runs necessary tests. I am not yet there but one integration is quite near. I know reality is that you never reach that completeness; there is always room for improvement. Still, I will continue working towards it!

If someone asks what did I learn about Azure DevOps in 2019 I have to say I don’t know. In 2018 and 2019 I’ve learned so much about it that I’m not sure what did I learn in 2019. This year I especially want to learn YAML pipelines (“pipeline as a code”), to mention some concrete goals for 2020.

Scrum Master – First Time Ever!

In 2019 I had an opportunity to be a scrum master first time in my career. It was one project that lasted three months. It was rewarding but also quite hard. I have analyzed my work in that project by myself several times after that; where did I succeed and where I should have done otherwise. Of course, as a rookie scrum master, you make some mistakes even if you have worked according to scrum several years and read many books about it. I hope this wasn’t my first and last time as a scrum master, because I have plenty of ideas about how I’ll improve next time!

Books, a Lot of Books!

I thought 2018 was an exceptionally good year that comes to reading books, 27 books. To my surprise, it wasn’t an exception! Somehow I read even more books in 2019, a total of 31 books! You can find those books from goodreads.com.

There were two books I gave 5/5 points:

• Pragmatic Programmer (20th Anniversary Edition) by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas and
• A Scrum Book by Jeff Sutherland et. al.

I strongly recommend both books but especially the Pragmatic Programmer. If there is only one book that I would recommend to every programmer it is the Pragmatic Programmer, and that new version is even better than the first version.

If in near future I will be a scrum master or a product owner, I will use A Scrum Book as my main textbook. There were really good recipes for a scrum in the book.

Less Blogging, but More Views and Visits

At the beginning of 2019, I had energy to study and blog. But then all of my extra energy was used as a scrum master and studying for Azure certificate. Thus I didn’t write so many blog posts in 2019. In 2018 I wrote 24 posts and in 2019 I wrote 8 posts. Even if I didn’t write that much seems that search engines have discovered my blog because there were much more views compared to the previous year: 959 views in 2018 vs 2774 views in 2019. Maybe the new domain http://www.lassiautio.com helped to get more points in searches also.

The most viewed blog post was Automatic Rollback to Integration Tests in C# from 2018 with 384 views. From blog posts I wrote in 2019, most popular was Create Objects With Test Data Builders with 341 views. It will be interesting to see how many views will my blog get in 2020.

New Language for 2020

As I’ve written earlier, I try to learn a new language every year. For 2020 I’m not yet sure what it will be. Last year I learned Angular. Even if I didn’t master it, now I know the basics of it and can understand source codes for Angular web applications.

Maybe I will learn some functional programming. In 2017 I realized how powerful functional programming can be while doing www.adventofcode.com (blog post about it: Advent of Code 2017). In recent years functional programming has become quite popular, so maybe I should finally learn it. In 2018 I read a book Functional Programming in C# by Enrico Buonanno and since that learning functional programming has been in my mind. Maybe 2020 is finally my time to step into the world of functional programming!