It’s January 2016

And the start of a new year. I’m a bit late getting this post out, but the start of this year has been rough.

New Year’s Eve started with my son getting pretty sick (and remaining so for over a week) and on Sunday the third, a beloved family pet passed. My SSD with all my source files and VM images decided to die that weekend as well. That first full week of January also saw temperatures plunging, which caused some pipes to freeze.

So, 2016 didn’t start off on a great foot with me, and every time I thought that “there’s nowhere to go but up” the next shoe dropped.

On the more positive side

I was renewed as a Microsoft MVP for the 5th time with a shiny new category - Cloud and Datacenter Management.

I continue in my role as an open source software engineer at Chef, which has been a dream role for me. As part of that, I’ve moved to take some official responsibility for the maintainership of Test-Kitchen, which is an awesome integration/acceptance testing tool for Chef and DSC (among other tools).

What’s happening in 2016

This year, I’m going to be focusing on building more online content. This will be at the expense of conferences and events I would attend in person. I’m not abandoning conferences completely. I’ll still be at the PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit and the PowerShell Conference EU. Of course, I’ll be at ChefConf and likely at both Chef Summit (Seattle and London - though neither has been announced yet, so we’ll see).

Let’s see what happens in the rest of 2016!