Mid Year / Summer Solstice Goal Review4 min read

☺☺ Please forgive me for the title, but that is an inside joke between my wife and I ☺☺

This post is going to recap my goal setting process and mid year review or how I am progressing at the half way point in 2017.

Goal Setting Process:

I looked at how I approached life and my day to day.  I am a task oriented person and can complete a list of tasks in no time, efficiently and effectively.  So why have I not used this method of goal setting for personal and work life before now.  Maybe it is the 40 year old in me that is getting wiser!!!

So, I made a list of personal goals and a list of technical / professional goals to work on in 2017.  Since this is the first time I have done such a thing I was very conservative with what goals I listed.  I have about 5 personal goals and 10 technical / professional goals.  See below on how those have progressed throughout the first half of the year.

Mid Year Status of Goals:

Good:

• My biggest life goal was realized last year when my son was born.  So from now to the end of time or 18 years he will be my most highly prioritized goals.  Who cannot love this face?!?!

• One of my proudest feeling is for starting this blog.  This has been something I have talked about doing several times over my 20+ years in IT.  I have never felt that anyone would read it or if I had anything worth reading.  But, I just ignored those thoughts this time and started blogging about stuff I was interested in and issues I see in my professional world.  So the blog is up and this recap is blog #10.  My goal for this was to start the blog and post a blog monthly.
• Learn PowerShell!!!  Wow, if just saying that does not hurt your brain, then you have never worked on a community project and tried to be a helpful contributor.  I am obsessed with dbatools and feel like I stalk Chrissy LeMaire (t) half the time.  I had “hacked” around with PowerShell in the past to accomplish specific tasks.  I never really felt comfortable and definitely never followed any best practice or standards on things I put together.  I just made them work.  However, now I have taken a step back and focused on learning the foundation of PowerShell topics and then building on those skills.  My next goal really helped enforce these fundamentals.  While working with the dbatools project I have been introduced to Git, TDD, Pester, PowerShell, GitHub, VS Code and others. I feel as though I am progressing nicely even though I still feel very lost most of the time.  Learning some of these extra topics have pointed me down the path of implementing them in my professional DBA world.
• Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches was a great kick start to focus on the fundamentals of PowerShell and re-enforce some of the things you had heard of but never used.  Another reason I think Chrissy is so great, is when I was starting my journey and was on the fence about buying this book, she volunteered to buy the book and let me borrow it to get started.  I finished in just over 6 weeks and feel it was a great jump start.

Bad:

• I will take a personal fail on my personal goals.  Weight loss is at the top and has been s personal struggle I have dealt with and really need to focus on the second half of 2017.
• I investigated a 30 day blog series and feedback I received was do not attempt that as a new blogger.  The comments were very helpful and gave me some things to shoot for in the future.  So I decided to put that on the long range goals, but I do put ideas and thoughts in that bucket frequently.

In the pipeline:

• One thing I put on my goal for the year was to write an article for MSSQLTips.  I have found out how to get the process started and started brainstorming on ideas for topics.  I have it narrowed down to a topic around SQL Server Availability Groups.  So I will hopefully get the article polished and published before the end of the year.
• Another thing I am starting to architect is a SQL Server AG Syncher tool that will sync AG settings like Logins and Agent Jobs on an Enterprise scale.  I am very excited to work on this and with push from some folks might make it a community project similar to dbatools.

 

That is it for now.  Time to continue learning while here are SQL Saturday Houston.