Stretch

In my previous post about my goals for 2019 I also included 3 stretch goals. These will help push me further to succeed but they aren’t crazy difficult. I also tried to chose goals for this that can be done in parallel with most of my other goals.

I’ve started to use VS Code a lot after first using Sublime. I think initially I was trying to stay away from Microsoft tools because I use them so much at work and wanted to learn different tools. In the end VS Code is much different from any of the tools I currently use so I still feel that I’m breaking out of my day to day mold at work. I’d like to really feel at home using this tool so I’ve decided to use it for all my projects going forward. This will force me to become an expert or at least be proficient.

Another tool we use regularly at work is Team Foundation Server (TFS) which is being renamed Azure DevOps Server 2019 with the next version. I could use a combination of Jira, Jenkins, and BitBucket to match it but there isn’t a clear free option for these. There is a free version of Azure DevOps in the cloud for teams of less than 5 which works out perfectly for me. Learning to use these tools from scratch using non-Microsoft frameworks and technology will be a good challenge. It will also help me stay organized using sprints and backlogs so I won’t get overwhelmed.

I found a great tutorial at Lisnet to build a highly available environment running load balanced database and web servers with automated VM provisioning. Everything in the tutorial is using open source tools - Proxmox, CentOS, Katello, Nginx, MySQL - that I have never used before and will help expand my DevOps skills and broaden my skill set. This is probably the hardest goal as I have already started on this tutorial but ran into roadblock due to my lack of knowledge but I still want to pursue this. Having this environment built will allow me to do more testing of my applications before I publish them to production as well as learn new concepts like blue green deployments and perfect doing CD.