Review of 2021, forward looking for 2022
Reviews of 2021
(when did I started it) Time flies, and I just realized that I started this Substack newsletter exactly 1 year ago;
(why did I started it) On one hand, in my day time job, I found it’s hard to find the right talents who can combine the engineering disciplines and the capability to leverage new cloud platform building blocks — in the context of SaaS building, that person would be the so called a 10x engineer; on the other hand, when chatted with some of my friends, who I really respected as great disciplined engineers, I often heard the tone of getting lost to the new cloud components. I felt that’s something I can help on for sure, so I started writing topics in some of the cloud building blocks;
(What was my initial KPI goal) I thought to get 1000 subscribers; (and did I achieve my goal) and I did not achieve this goal, though the newsletter’s readership statistics itself is not too bad — there was a reflection point that search engines become the major driver of the incoming audiences than my personal social media account, so “content is king” is correct.
(What I got rewarded from writing this newsletter) Some of the feedbacks and personal private notes were really encouraging — thanks for being supportive; and I got to know some really smart folks who share the same passion;
(What have got readers likes most) The cloud native AuthN and AuthZ series, and the AWS networking series were pretty good.
Forward looking for 2022
Looking back Item 3 and Item 4 above, I think my initial KPI may not accurately reflect what I really wanted to achieve:
I was trying to share a topic, hopefully helpful to engineers who felt it’s a daunting topic from outside;
I was trying to get connected to people who are curious enough to keep learning and who are specifically interested the topics — so that when timing / opportunity comes, we can find a way to work with each other, for example, right now I am hiring like crazy in my day time job; but finding the right talent is always not that easy
So, I am going to keep writing interesting stuff and get connected with liked-minds
I am going to more concentrate on topics in cloud security and cloud networking subjects, from a software developer’s perspective rather than a system engineer’s or IT infrastructure person’s perspective in 2022
I hope to get one mini e-book out of this journey by the end of 2022
I hope this mini e-book can be of help to a software developer who get started in the journey of “Programming the cloud” instead of “Programing on cloud”
Looking forward to 2022 with you, my fellow readers.