2024 was a roller coaster of a ride. In my last year’s post, I had a few themes that I wanted to spend my time on. Here’s a quick glance on how they turned out –
Category – General
| Theme | Status / Comments |
| Sharpen writing skills | This was harder than I thought. There isn’t a measure for writing. It either good or bad. When you write enough, you’d have built an intuition of that measure. I spent most year using bullet journal method to write day to day but not enough on long form writing (articles, reflections etc). The only other form of writing that I did was letter writing with some pen pals via snail mail. I will continue the focus in 2025. |
| Find the balance with work, exercise and leisure | Work life balance is a norm in Sweden, had no struggles there. But I am responsible for some lame efforts to find time to exercise. But finally I found some motivation and finally hit the gym in December. |
| Read for pleasure and expanding professional horizon. | This went decent. Did a decent amount of reading especially on topics around Data Mesh. I had access to Gartner at previous job and it was great to read some of their research articles. I did read a few fiction books. ‘The Personal Librarian’, ‘The Way Home : Tales from a life without technology‘ and ‘Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop’ were my favorite picks. |
Category – Professional
| Theme | Status / Comment |
| Solidify software engineering principles aka System design from 1st principles. | This is an ongoing effort. ‘Thinking in Systems’ was the book I used to help tackle this topic from a tech agnostic perspective. It helps that works requires me to focus on this topic as well. I have been designing our Data Landscape using principles of composable architecture at Aurobay. |
| Focus on reducing the gap between data engineering and software engineering practices using Data mesh as guiding framework. | This is a tough one. But I managed to start somewhere using some principles in our Platform team at work. All infra is declared in TF, version controlled in Github, deployed via Github action, independent repos and pipelines for infra and data pipelines etc. Currently focusing on how to bring Data Products to life using Open Data Product Specification. |
| Move from Software architecture elevator from penthouse to the engine room more frequently and spend significant time of the year in the engine room. | Keeping up with the analogy, this turned out a little different kind of engine room experience. Instead of keeping an existing engine up and running, I spent a lot of time in designing the right engine schematics, looking at our new needs and designing the right power delivery of the engine. Party attributed to change of jobs and needs at the new organization. But I am playing around and coding in Python and Rust. |
| Find ways to express myself better via public speaking / blogs / micro blogging. Share crystal clear ideas and thoughts. I found that I can talk about these ideas easily in a work context but struggle to put it in words or presentations. | There’s always room for improvement here, but I think I made some strides here. The presentations I made these year had much better story telling components and diagrams than previous years. Also took part as a mentor in New Voices program run by Mark Pergola in AWS community space. Teaching made me realize what areas I was good at and which needed some updates. |
| Learn to take (sell) technical ideas to business personas better. Focus more mental models, operational structures, service designs. | Had a great year at this given the nature of work at the current assignment. Building up a practice from scratch required a lot of buy in from leadership and selling to other leaders in the organization. I hope to hire a coach via work to enhance this event further next year. |
Category – Community
| Theme | Status / Comment |
| More AWS Meetups in Göteborg. | We had a few meetups. The best part was we added two more organizers to the group. Hope that means more bandwidth and more events next year. |
| Speak at more local meetups in Scandinavia | Managed to speak at a couple events in Stockholm and Oslo. Not much traction else where but I didn’t try hard. |
| Mentor people if the time and energy allows. | Tried to mentor someone via She Sharp mentorship program. It was way harder than I thought. Perhaps there was a mismatch in the expectations of the nature of the mentorship, I didn’t feel I did justice as a mentor. Perhaps this can change next year. |
2024 reflections and milestones
I was enjoying my stint at Polestar, but had to leave it behind as the company decided to layoff 40% employees in digital. Since I am on a work visa, I could not wait for it and decided to move on. Everything happens for a reason and I found a gig at Aurobay with even more opportunity and scope to build a data practice from a blank slate.
Looking back retroactively, here are a few key things I learned this year:
- If you are an individual contributor, make sure your work is visible and understandable. This is especially true if you are working in an enterprise setup where key business is driven by domain other than pure technology (e.g. Automotive, Insurance etc). more here
- Industry speaks plenty about Data Governance and Data Quality but I fail to see and justify these are separate roles. I believe a good architecture setup and encoding quality checks using various software engineering methods is a better way of ensuring both of them.
- The best architectures are those that teams can actually implement and contribute directly to the company’s goals.
- Community knowledge sharing accelerates everyone’s growth.
- Data is of most important asset for companies in the next year. RAG, AI Agents, ML models, all need data available on demand to ensure you are reducing opportunity cost. It’s time teams treat data as an output of their product and not a byproduct some other teams take care of (Read about Data Products).
Milestones
- 2 book reviews 1,2
- 5 in person talks.
- Data Saturday Oslo
- AWS Community Day Italy, Rome
- DevOpsPro Vilnius
- Data Analytics Summit, Berlin
- Come to Code,Potenza Italy
- 3 panel discussions
- 1 online talk at DASA Connect
- Speaker Coach in the New Voices program
- 1 attempt at being someone’s mentor at Shesharp
- 2 trips to US – AWS Heroes Summit Seattle and AWS Re:invent 2024
- Making local connections and having interesting conversations at CTO Craft, Gothenburg
- Plus a few outreach’s via LinkedIn for friendly consultations.
- Ditched Windows (and Mac) as personal daily drivers. I will use Linux henceforth. Perhaps I will write a dedicated post on this if someone is interested.
Other stuff
Twitter was the social media I used and adored. I learned a lot from it, made very good friends and it played a big part in helping me get my voice heard internationally. Unfortunately after its metamorphosis into X and hijacking of the algorithm by a brilliantly insane owner, I no longer got any value or reach from the platform. I had so many memories from it and couldn’t get rid of it totally. Eventually I kept the account, but I do not post there any longer. If you are interested to keep in touch outside of LinkedIn, please join me on Bluesky. You can follow from any of the fediverse apps (Mastodon, Threads, Nostr etc.)
I’ll post my 2025 themes in another post, this post is long enough as it is now. Thanks for reading. I welcome your thoughts, comments and questions.
Adios!
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