Well, 2022 is a wrap and it was wonderful! I took a pretty big chance in 2019 when I left Cisco and joined Zenabi. Little did I know what would happen since then:
* Working with some incredible people and really getting back into full time software development. We launched a few projects and serviced a bunch of clients.
* Seeing Zenabi crumble towards the end of 2019 due to a few things that I thought could have been different. But I really started to see the things I did wrong and should have changed. I blame nobody and should have taken more responsibility. It was a hard lesson learned.
* In 2020 seeing how the pandemic changed everything! All the sudden more people worked like me from home! Wow! I also became a bit disillusioned and made my mind up I would no longer work on projects I didn’t find meaningful to me.
* In the end of 2020 I started the job hunt again and found WeaveGrid! What a great opportunity! After being denied from all the FAANG companies (thank heavens!) and then going 3/3 with other companies I interviewed with WeaveGrid was the one I took: I paid the least, but offered the opportunity I was looking for!
So fast forward two years to now! Wow, I’ve been with WeaveGrid for 2 years now and saw it go from 13 people to about 70+ where we are now and I’m so excited about it. Like really! (Sorry for all the explanation marks!!! No I guess I’m not!)
So what am I going to do in 2023?
* I’m really doubling down on WeaveGrid. I’ve got some pretty great projects I’m working on. I’m in charge of the Vehicles Integration technical team. We are going to connect to more great companies and launch some applications for these auto makers. My hope is to get our applications into the auto makers apps to show them all sorts of cool stuff. I’m a little vague about this but it should become apparent this year what we’re doing.
* I’m quitting my teaching moonlighting gig! I’ve been contracting with Pearson for about 3 years now teaching classes on Kubernetes,etc. I’ve really enjoyed it and had great experiences recording the classes and teaching them live. But this is it! I’ll finish teaching my last class in March. Why am I stopping? I’m being more intentional with my time this year. I have some goals I want to accomplish and as much as I’ve enjoyed teaching on O’Reilly’s platform, it’s time to self-align.
* I’m going to be working more on my side project https://pdx.totheworld.app. I don’t ever want to interview again so as I do more with WeaveGrid I’d like to gain another revenue stream based on my own work. So this is an attempt to do that. This is also one of the reasons I’m quitting teaching.
So this is pretty much it for 2023 that I’m working on. What about you? Have you had to cut things out of your life to self-align and really set yourself up to accomplish your goals? It was a hard decision to make to stop teaching but I feel really good about it now.
Hope you have a great 2023!
