Reflections on the year

A lot happened this year for me, some good some bad (but mostly good) and  I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the year.  I made it to my first technical conference, got my first and second tablet, I started and finished some seemingly daunting work projects, I met, worked with and learned a ton from some incredibly smart people, I grew my network of professional contacts, list goes on and on.  One particularly important milestone that I was able to hit was my first full year of blogging.  Its been a great journey so far and I am hoping 2013 will be just as great if not better.

One goal of mine was to grow the blog, and I feel like I accomplished that goal although that wasn’t exactly a very specific goal I will admit.  Another goal I had in mind when I started doing this was just to be able to help others out with technical issues as much as I could.  I am really pleased with how things have come along so far, I have managed to grow my readership and have succeeded in getting in some fresh authors that have made some great contributions, who I would like to thank very much.  I would also like to thank all of the other contributors including the readers for helping to grow the blog this past year.  I know there will be a lot of work to do in 2013 and I feel like this was a great first full year for the blog.  I have had a great deal of fun learning about blogging and cultivating this blog and have no doubts that there will be some great stuff to come in the coming year.

I didn’t expect to learn nearly as much as I did about Exchange, Powershell, Lync, backups and networking.  These are the areas that I have been working with primarily in my current role and I will say for the most part I have loved these additional responsibilities.  I have fallen in love with Exchange and Powershell and would like to explore these areas and write about them much more in 2013.

There are some exciting areas that will come into focus more next year, which I am excited about.  I will be building a full on, clustered virtual environment, a new Exchange 2013 test bed, a Server 2012 Active Directory environment and much more I’m sure.  I have also managed to keep my Linux skills sharp (well somewhat) by labbing at home and plan to continue growing my home environment and skills that do not otherwise get any “production” to share my experiences on the blog.  I will hopefully be building a home grown SAN, adding a node to my virtual environment to create a cluster and obtaining some network gear so there should be some interesting topics on those fronts as well.

So anyway, I would love to hear any and all feedback from the readers!  What should I change?  What can I improve on?  Which topics are the most informative and the most interesting?  Knowing these types of things would be a great way to help build this blog and hopefully continue to grow in 2013.  Thank you all again, happy new years!

 

Josh Reichardt

Josh is the creator of this blog, a system administrator and a contributor to other technology communities such as /r/sysadmin and Ops School. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.