2017: Year in Review
Tags: dotnet, yearinreview, dotnetfringe
Published: 2018-01-03 02:48:35

---
title: "2017: Year in Review"
published: true
tags: dotnet,year-in-review,dotnetfringe
canonical_url: https://SeanKilleen.com/2017/12/recapping-a-year-for-the-record-books/
---

What a year, what a year! So much was packed into 2017 that for the first time I felt like a recap post actually makes sense, if only so I can keep it all straight.

## Speaking & Writing

- **My first national conference talk** : This year I was [selected to speak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFDXNGFvcYg) at [.NET Fringe](http://dotnetfringe.org), one of my favorite conferences of all time. It was a privilege and a thrill.
- **More talks** : I gave [5 other talks](https://seankilleen.com/Presentations/) to various groups on subjects including Akka.NET, ElasticSearch, and an introduction to OSS. Also, did a fun presentation with my talented colleague Dan Davis called “The Dev-inci Code”, to help our Excella BAs & devs better understand each other.
- **Blog posts** on Jekyll, .NET Fringe, The S3 Outage, ICAgile, and avoiding primitive obsession in configuration. I’d like to write more, but with the rest of this year, I’ll forgive myself.

## Work Stuff

- **Successful launch of a gigantic legacy modernization** : Over the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to be the technical lead on the best team for a really challenging project. This project was a big bang modernization effort (not our choice) that replaced a mainframe system responsible for managing more than $7 billion in pension funds. In August, all 2.5 million lines of code went live, with no major issues! We’ve since done 6 or 7 releases with no major issues as well. By far one of the biggest accomplishments of my career, and we couldn’t have done it without a phenomenal team.
- **I became a .NET Xpert!** Excella has a great program to reward employees that continuously commit to making an impact beyond our client sites. The gist is that every 6 months I do a certain amount (or more) of activities against a “points system”, such as writing, speaking, OSS work, etc. Because of that, I am now afforded 20% time – 1 day per week that is now my own to contribute more widely to Excella and beyond. It’s a great honor to be a part of their services leadership.
- **TechLadies happy hour** : I’m a big fan of [Allison Esposito](https://twitter.com/allisonveronica) and the work she’s doing with [Tech Ladies](https://www.hiretechladies.com). It’s crucially important to get more women into this field – we desperately need their talent & diversity of thought. I worked with Excella to host a Tech Ladies happy hour earlier in the year, and we ended up with over 100 attendees! I also got to meet [Cynthia Bell McGillis](https://twitter.com/cynthiamcgillis) who’s a fantastic liaison for Tech Ladies in the DC area.
- **Creating & launching [xluh.co](http://xluh.co)**: as part of my aforementioned Xpert time, I got fed up one day with URL shorteners costing an arm & a leg to get your own domain and analytics. So I built [http://xluh.co](http://xluh.co) using .NET Core. The source code is at [http://xluh.co/repo](http://xluh.co/repo) if you’re interested.
- **Co-Authoring a course on Agile Testing & Automation** : Along with my excellent colleague [Noura Saad](http://twitter.com/naranir), I created & taught a course on agile testing and automation, designed for those in traditional testing roles who may only be familiar with testing from a waterfall or traditional test plan perspective. The course provides attendees with two ICAgile certifications (ICP-TST/ICP-ATA). Authoring the course and getting certified was a great learning experience and I’m looking forward to improving upon it for our two upcoming courses.

I also:

- Co-taught several Agile Engineering courses (where students can earn their CSD certification after passing an assessment)
- Created a screencast walk-through for one of our Agile Engineering course assessments for those who have trouble with it.
- Built a quick Twilio forwarding app because our conference phones stink at saving numbers (blog post on this in the future)
- Introduced & used structured logging with great success on our client project, saving a ton of time and adding visibility to some really gnarly integration points.
- Started (and finished) a “Dear Agile” blog series experiment, fielding questions for our Agile experts to answer.
- Took some Neo4j training that I think is going to bear fruit in the coming year. Graph databases have so much potential.

## Personal Stuff

I try not to be too personal on this blog as it’s mostly tech, but there are some things I just had to mention. I’ll keep it brief. :)

- **I got engaged!** In March, I took a trip to Key West with the love of my life and asked her to marry me. She said yes. It was awesome.
- **I got married!** Because we’re crazy people, we decided “why wait to plan this wedding? Let’s just do it!” And so, on November 3rd, Amanda and I got hitched. It was hands down the best day of my life, and everything that I wanted it to be.
- **Politics** : Politics was a dumpster fire in 2017. So much has happened to the U.S. in the last 12 months that genuinely worries me about the future and tests my optimism on a daily basis. In 2018 I want to work to help more people through these times, particularly those who aren’t afforded my many varied privileges.

## Blog Stats

- I had `86,410` page views on the blog this year as of the time of this writing. That’s a great feeling!
- 8 of the top 10 blog posts are specific “how to” articles, which tells me they probably had good SEO, and that if I need a quick how-to, probably lots of other people do as well.
- All of my top 10 blog posts were written over 1.5 years ago. Working on some fresh content is probably a good idea.

## What’s Next?

This is one of my favorite questions of all time. Normally I’d list a ton of things in this section, but that leads me to my first point:

- **A Focus on Focus**. I have a ~~big~~ gigantic list of stuff I want to do. I want to limit my work in progress and focus on finishing so that I’m more impactful and forced to consciously think about priorities more often.
- I’ve got some [talks coming up in 2018](https://seankilleen.com/Presentations/).
- …and plenty more fun things in the works!

## Bring it on, 2018!

I’m looking forward to the year to come – challenges and joys alike.

Anything here catch your eye? Looking forward to something yourself? Drop it in the comments!

Wishing you all the best in the coming year.

[2017: Year in Review](https://SeanKilleen.com/2017/12/recapping-a-year-for-the-record-books/) was originally published by Sean Killeen at [SeanKilleen.com](https://SeanKilleen.com) on December 31, 2017.