📆 2022 in a nutshell!

Another year is ending, and what 🎊 amazing year 🎊. It is time to recap this 2022 reviewing all the things done, lessons learned, and identifying improvement areas or gaps to cover. I could say that it is basically my own personal retro in front of my Kanban.

This year was very special for me, as it was the first one working fully in my new team, the amazing EMEA Cloud-Native Adoption Practice at Red Hat. It means that I was fully immersed in an international environment, every single day. It was a huge challenge for me collaborating, working, learning, sharing with others from many different countries, regions, and cultures (and sometimes suffering the different time zones). I joined Red Hat many years ago (🎂 8 years from now 🎂, the longest time in the same company), but joining this team was another starting point in my career. I was very nervous 😟, sometimes stressed 😧, and always afraid 😞 about my own Impostor syndrome … but the fact is that everything went better than I expected and this journey was a BLAST 😁.

I had the chance to work with so many talented, open-minded people, and always willing to support and help me in anything. Their honest, transparent, and proactive feedback was key for helping me to improve and do my best every single day. So, I can say thank you to all of them.

Definitely, this is the team, and people where I want to be.

But, what kind of things have I done? I will try to summarize (and anonymize) the most important (for sure I am missing something 😝 …).

📝 Blogging 📝

I like blogging, and in general writing anything to summarize my findings, engagements, or anything I am working on … most of my colleagues know me about my documents. This year was not so much productive as I wanted in my personal site, but this is list of my posts:

However, I am very proud of the publication of one of them in the Red Hat Developer:

Red Hat AMQ Broker Cheat Sheet

I can say that it was the most important publication during this year, and I got great feedback from the readers.

One of the goals of my team is to help our customers and service teams to easily adopt our technology, so I helped to improve some internal resources. The most important one was providing a new CER template (a.k.a. Consulting Engagement Report) related to Red Hat AMQ Broker. This template provides the scaffold, common patterns, and structures about Messaging Services based on this product, in cloud and non-cloud environments. So, it is basically an accelerator of our services in that area.

🏢 Customers 🏢, 💻 Technologies 💻, 👫 People 👫, 📈 DevOps and Agile 🚤

This chapter was the most exciting as it basically includes my daily basics in my team. It was a very productive year with a long list of customers, engagements, technologies, and enablement, where I could help others to achieve great outcomes, building amazing outputs, and creating high-performance teams.

If I need to summarize the most important ones, here there is the list:

Transformation and Acceleration: Building new teams and implementing new Ways of Working based in a DevOps culture and Agile practices to transform the teams (and impacting the organizations). Delivering fast solutions, following the Agile principles and values, and shaping high-performance teams are the most challenging things I was involved with, and the most exciting ones. I love these kinds of engagements. Most of them were aligned to improve the Software Delivery Life Cycle including new technologies, processes, and skilling people to achieve them.
Apache Kafka migrations and architectures: I was involved with different customers to help them in Apache Kafka migrations in different scenarios (on-prem to cloud, upgrading versions, …) or designing architectures where this component is key for data streaming solutions, or microservices architectures. It was a good chance to put in real scenarios something that we wrote some time ago in the Strimzi Blog.
Messaging solutions or services in cloud environments based in Red Hat AMQ Broker, when Apache Kafka was not an option, using the OpenShift Operator. It was a good chance to give feedback about the product from our field scenarios and reporting more features, opening issues, or improving our Knowledge Base with more extra references, such as this article, or this another one. I love our way of collaboration with different Red Hat teams to improve our products.
Workshops about Event-Driven Architectures in some customers as a way to design new solutions in cloud environments. These kinds of workshops helped me to create a sample use case with many different components and demonstrate some of the benefits (and trade-offs). This workshop is based in this repository.
Advanced microservices architectures or patterns using Red Hat Service Mesh and Red Hat Serverless. It could be the most technological challenge this year for one customer. Designing and implementing a solution for accelerating a refactorization of a monolithic application into a microservices architecture, delegating some cross functional aspects into the features and capabilities provided by both solutions on top of OpenShift. I learned many things that for sure will help me in other similar scenarios.
Collaboration at Konveyor Community in some of the tools, or repos, to promote and accelerate the modernization and migration of applications to Kubernetes and Cloud-native technologies. I could help to improve the Tackle Pathfinder Knowledge Base and collaborate with the amazing team behind the TackleTest, an automated unit and UI test generation tool to verify your application. I am looking forward to collaborating more next year.
Facilitating our amazing DevOps Culture and Practices enablement is basically one of my favorite tasks done this year. I had the chance to run in different places (Brussels, Dubai, Frankfurt, London, and Madrid), and one virtually (but I prefer the on-site version). This enablement represents perfectly our Way of Working and an immersive life experience about DevOps and Agile in a single week. I could say many things about that, but it is better get them from the public references of some of the attendees:
A bunch of technologies … The full list of technologies I touched this year is so long, but mostly I was working with: Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, Tekton, Argo CD, ActiveMQ Artemis, Red Hat AMQ Streams (Apache Kafka), Strimzi, Keycloak, Quarkus, Apache Camel, Infinispan, Istio and Service Mesh, Serverless with Knative, …

💫 Rewards, Recognitions and Achievements 💫

To be rewarded and recognized by your peers is the best way to get positive feedback. Who does not like to be rewarded? This year was a good one in this area.

I am not looking to get this kind of recognition from others, however, it helps me to identify which kind of actions have more impact on my colleagues and continue them in the best way, and also to identify areas where I should work to improve them. In any case, it is a metric to measure how I can help and collaborate with others better.

One of these rewards comes from the Red Hat Giveback Program. This is an incentive program to recognize an associate who goes above-and-beyond their role-based responsibilities and makes contributions which impact Red Hat. This year I got the following rewards from this program:

It was not the only reward from my colleagues, I was awarded as Red Hat Champion for Red Hat OpenShift in the Q2 of 2022, that it was something far away from any of my expectations or plans. The Red Hat Champions program recognizes those Red Hatters who have proven their product expertise by going above and beyond to ensure the success of Red Hat products and technologies. It is a peer-nominated program, intended to reward individual Red Hatters that demonstrate Red Hat culture and values while helping to establish a secure future for Red Hat product growth. So, I was humbled to be proposed and awarded with this recognition by my colleagues. Thank you so much!!!

More than 1000 points in our Red Hat Reward Zone … another Red Hat’s platform for peer to peer recognition in different competencies to promote the Red Hat’s values and culture within our colleagues, teams, and customers. My rewards in a nutshell:

But, the best achievement this year was to beat my personal best in a Half-Marathon race. It was in Madrid and I completed the race in 1:43:56 … that was 1 minute faster than my previous PB. I am very proud of that achievement, and I am planning to break it again soon.

🎯 Next Year 🎯

I like to have great goals and outcomes to help me to improve myself everyday, but I am not setting them ahead or in stone. I am agile and pivot as I learn more and when it is appropriate 🚀.

For the next year I am expecting to meet with more colleagues, learn more from all of them, and have fun in anything I will be involved in. My goals will appear sooner or later, but I don’t mind for now. For sure, my Kanban will have great items to execute.

For my personal life, I have a great milestone to set up a new lifestyle at the end of the Spring, but it is something that someday I will share broadly with all of you.

Thank you so much to be here, as definitely you are part of the journey of the last year, and a key stakeholder for the next year.

See you in 2023!!! 💻💾💿☕📖🏃💫🏢